Light that behaves like light
RenderingThe live editor stays responsive with screen-space lighting and short idle refinement. When you ask for a final frame, the full tracer converges tile by tile with no render farm or export queue. The whole pipeline runs in the tab.
The pipeline
Representation
Molecular cartoons, solvent surfaces, atoms, sticks, and mixed representations — layered per selection, so a ribbon, its pocket surface, and a bound ligand coexist in one scene.
Material
A packed 2K PBR atlas — 1K protein, membrane, ceramic, and machined-metal families — projected in world space with seamless triplanar sampling. Molecules have no UVs; they don’t need them.
Light transport
For final renders, ray-traced shadows, ambient visibility, indirect light, and glossy reflection accumulate sample by sample. Each traced pass is explicitly enabled per project.
Surface response
Energy-conserving diffuse, subsurface, and clearcoat layers. Subsurface depth is thickness-driven and specified per material — in ångströms, because that is the scale the light is working at.
Lens & colour
Depth of field, bloom, and fog shape the frame; AgX and ACES pipelines grade it. The same controls a cinematographer would reach for, at molecular scale.
Export
Tiled still export renders frames far larger than the screen, tile by tile — figure and poster resolution straight from the tab.
Atlas channels
Renderer-neutral by design: geometric signal in height, scan grain in roughness, recesses isolated as a true cavity mask.
Rebuild the atlas
A deterministic pipeline turns neutral material scans into perfectly repeating, mip-stable tiles.