Render modes
The inspector rail switches what the viewport draws. Sixteen modes in three groups.
Render
| Mode | Shows |
|---|---|
| Final Render | Everything, including ambient occlusion, bloom, and vignette |
| Raw Render | The same lighting with the post stack off |
Raw Render is the honest one when you're judging a material — post-processing flatters roughness and hides banding.
CAUTION
Ambient occlusion, bloom, and vignette only apply in Final Render. If a setting seems to do nothing, check which mode you're in.
Material channels
Each isolates one input so you can see it on its own:
- Base Color
- Metalness
- Roughness
- Specular
- Normal Map
- AO Map
- Opacity
- Emission
- Clear Coat
- Clear Coat Roughness
Six of these — Specular, AO, Opacity, Emission, Clear Coat and Clear Coat Roughness — are hidden by default. The everyday PBR set stays visible so the rail is short; turn the specialists back on in Settings ▸ Viewport.
Metallic-roughness, not specular-glossiness
glTF uses the metallic-roughness workflow, so if you're used to Sketchfab's Specular/Glossiness channels, their equivalents here are Metalness and Roughness.
Geometry
| Mode | Use it to |
|---|---|
| Matcap | Read form and silhouette with no material or lighting in the way — the fastest way to spot bad shading or a pinched normal |
| Wireframe | Check topology and density |
| UV Checker | Find stretched, flipped, or overlapping UVs |
Texture overrides
The texture panel loads your own maps onto the model, per material and per channel, without touching the file on disk.
Pick a material, pick a channel, drop an image. Or drop a whole folder and let the naming convention sort them.
Strength
Every channel except base color has a 0–1 strength control — the scalar the renderer multiplies that channel by. Pull roughness to 0.3 to see how much of the look it's really carrying.
Base color has no strength slider, and that's a deliberate limitation rather than an oversight: a color map can't be faded toward "unused" without patching the shader. It can only be cleared.
Flip Y on normal maps
Normal maps come in two conventions, and there's no reliable way to detect which you've got:
- OpenGL (+Y) — green channel points up. Blender, Substance's OpenGL export.
- DirectX (−Y) — green channel points down. Unreal, Unity's default.
Flip Y inverts the green channel per material. If your surface detail looks inverted — bumps reading as dents under a moving light — this is the switch.
UV inspection
In split view, hovering the UV canvas drops a marker on the model at the matching point — so an unfamiliar island can be traced back to the part of the mesh it actually wraps.
Next: camera tool.