The 3D viewer experience
Standard and HD rendering and how the viewer chooses, click-to-zoom, and the three backdrop options — HDRI, photograph or solid colour — authored in Studio.
Two things decide how a scene looks: what you set in Studio, which travels with the scene, and which renderer the visitor’s browser can run. The first is authored once. The second is negotiated per device.
Two renderers
Backend | Availability | Role |
| Always | The production pipeline. Every scene, every browser |
| When a GPU adapter is obtainable | HD mode, in beta |
The HD control only appears when a WebGPU adapter has actually been acquired. Checking for navigator.gpu is not enough — browsers expose the API on devices whose driver is denylisted, where requesting an adapter returns nothing. Probing for the real adapter is what stops the button appearing on a machine that cannot honour it.
Switching
The preference is stored locally and applied on the next load, so toggling HD reloads the page. That is deliberate rather than a limitation: swapping the graphics backend under a live scene means tearing down an active GPU context mid-frame, and a clean boot is more reliable than a hot swap.
For a one-off comparison without changing the stored preference, append ?renderer=webgpu or ?renderer=webgl to the URL. The parameter wins for that load only.
If the HD pipeline reports sustained device errors, the viewer falls back to standard rendering and reloads on its own. A broken pipeline must never leave someone staring at an empty canvas.
Clicking to zoom
Clicking a component selects it and moves the camera to frame it. It is on by default and toggles from the viewer controls, alongside selection mode.
Worth turning off in two situations: when the scene is decorative on a page and camera moves would be distracting, and when someone is comparing parts across an assembly and wants the overview to stay put while they click through. When it is off, clicking still selects — it just does not move the camera.
The backdrop
The 3D canvas renders alpha-transparent, so whatever sits behind it shows through. That single decision is why there are three backdrop options rather than one setting with three modes:
Option | What it is | Use it when |
HDRI | An environment map that lights the model and provides reflections | The product has metal, glass or gloss and needs believable reflections |
Photograph | An image layer behind the model | The product should appear in a setting — a workshop, a floor, a room |
Solid colour | The page background, with the image layer off | The product is the subject and nothing should compete with it |
An HDRI is not a backdrop in the visual sense — its job is lighting. You can light with an HDRI while showing a flat colour behind the model, and for most technical products that combination reads best: accurate reflections, nothing distracting behind the geometry. Environment intensity and rotation are both authored, so you can turn the light source to fall the way you want across the product.
Set in Studio, applied in the viewer
The look of the render is authored, not negotiated per visitor:
Setting | Governs |
Camera | Starting position, framing and lens for the scene |
Environment | HDRI, its intensity and rotation |
Backdrop | Whether an image layer is shown, and which image |
Contact shadows | How the model grounds against the surface below it |
Post-processing | Exposure and the effect chain |
All of it ships with the scene, so a link opened on a phone in a workshop and the same link opened on a workstation are looking at the same authored product — one is simply rendering it with more headroom.
What HD actually changes
HD mode is a different graphics backend, not a different scene. Same geometry, same materials, same camera, same authored lighting. What improves is how faithfully the renderer resolves them — shading, shadow quality and the effect chain — on hardware that can afford it.
Nothing about a scene needs to be prepared for HD. Author once, and visitors whose machines can run it get the better render without anything to configure.