Preview your material path-traced, right in the viewport
The real-time viewport is great for painting, but some material decisions — how a roughness map catches bounced light, how height reads in soft shadow — only show up under a true ray-traced render. Mixos builds one in: flip the Ray toggle and the viewport becomes a progressive path-traced render of the exact scene you're editing, no export and no external renderer.
The short answer
Click the Ray toggle in the Mixos viewport to switch to a progressive path-traced preview — physically bounced light, soft shadows, and glossy reflections on your actual layer stack. It refines in place as samples accumulate, restarts instantly when you move the camera, and turns off with a click.
Step by step
- 1
Set up your look first
Path tracing is a preview mode, not an editing mode — get your layers, masks, and lighting environment where you want them in the real-time viewport first.
- 2
Flip the Ray toggle
Click Ray in the viewport controls (it's available in the full 3D view). The current view starts rendering progressively: it resolves from noisy to clean as samples accumulate per pixel.
- 3
Pick a quality level
Fast, Balanced, and High set the ray bounce depth — Fast is snappy on any GPU, High chases light through more bounces for the truest indirect illumination. You can also halve the render resolution for quicker feedback.
- 4
Frame the shot
Orbit or zoom and the render restarts instantly for the new view. For product-shot close-ups, enable depth of field — it's traced with a physical thin-lens camera, so you set an f-stop and focus distance like a real lens.
- 5
Toggle back and keep painting
Click Ray again to return to the real-time WebGPU viewport. Nothing about your project changes — the path tracer reads the same material you're editing, so what you saw is what your exported maps will do in a renderer.
Why preview path-traced at all
A rasterized real-time viewport approximates global illumination; a path tracer simulates it — light actually bounces between surfaces, colors bleed, and glossy reflections pick up the environment and the model itself. That's the closest thing to seeing your texture inside Cycles, Redshift, Octane, or Arnold before you ever export a map.
Because the preview reads your live layer stack, it doubles as a sanity check: metallic and roughness balance, height and normal strength, and how weathering masks read under soft light are all judged in the same lighting model your final renderer will use.
How it stays fast
The render is progressive — you get a usable image in the first second and a clean one if you let it sit, up to a configurable sample target. Camera moves reset the accumulation instantly rather than blocking, so framing a shot stays interactive.
It runs in the same browser tab as the editor, with quality and resolution settings that persist per device — tune them once for your GPU and the toggle behaves the same every session.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to install anything or export my model?
No. The path-traced preview runs in the same browser tab as the editor, on the same scene you're editing — one click on the Ray toggle switches it on and off.
Is the path-traced preview free?
Yes — like painting, layering, and baking, the preview is part of the free editor. It never spends credits.
Can I keep painting while it renders?
Ray is a preview of the current view — switch back to the real-time viewport to paint, then flip Ray on again to check the result. The toggle is instant in both directions.
Does it support depth of field?
Yes. Depth of field is traced with a physical thin-lens camera model — set the f-stop and focus distance for real optical blur, ideal for product-style close-ups.
The Ray toggle is one click away in the free editor — see your material under true bounced light.