Viewing & inspecting

The two viewports, the camera, shading and heatmap modes, playback and the clip list — everything you use to look at a LOD and judge it.

On this page

Original and LOD viewports
Camera
Viewport toolbars
Shading modes and heatmaps
Playback and clips

Original and LOD viewports

The left viewport always shows the original mesh; the right one shows the level selected in the LOD table. Both play the same animation frame and share one camera, so any difference you see is the LOD.

Original mesh and LOD 4 side by side — Original (23 406 triangles) and LOD 4 (1 461 triangles) at the same frame.

The toolbar above the viewports has Fit to window, Joints basis (joint axes), Show grid, and the layout choice Single view / Side by side.

Camera

Mouse	Action
Left-drag	Orbit
Right-drag	Pan
Wheel	Zoom. Close to the mesh the steps can be large — one or two notches at a time.

Camera sensitivity and behaviour are configured in Settings > Navigation.

Viewport toolbars

Each viewport has its own toolbar, so the original and the LOD can be shown differently (for example textured original, heatmap LOD):

Button	Purpose
Texturing	Show the character's texture. If the shading box says Textured but the mesh is grey, turn this on.
Wireframe	Overlay the triangle edges — shows where the simplifier kept detail.
Lights	Lit or flat shading.
Skeleton rendering	Draw the joints and bones.
Face culling	Hide back faces.
Smooth Normals	Recompute smooth vertex normals for display.
Shading box	See Shading modes.
Padded (LOD viewport)	Show the texture repaired in the Atlas Editor instead of the original.

The original, LOD 4 with a grey strip at a seam, and LOD 4 with the repaired texture — Both viewports textured with Lights off, zoomed in on the jeans. LOD 4 reads background from the texture along a seam (the grey strip). After Solve LOD(n) texturing in the Atlas Editor with Surface re-projection, the LOD viewport switches Padded on and shows the repaired texture: the fabric continues across the seam.

The same view with the texture repaired by Nearest-covered — The same view solved with Nearest-covered (color bleed): the strip is covered too, with streaks along the edge. Filling texture gaps compares the two.

Shading modes and heatmaps

The shading box of the LOD viewport offers Textured, Checkerboard (reveals UV stretching), Normals, and two heatmaps:

Heatmap – Surface error: how far each part of the LOD sits from the original surface at the current frame.
Heatmap – Silhouette error: how much each part changes the character's outline at the current frame.

Blue is little deviation; green, yellow and red are progressively more. The colour range is set in Settings > Silhouette error visualization.

Silhouette heatmap on the LOD — Textured original and silhouette heatmap on LOD 4. Hot spots gather at thin or strongly bent parts.

Heatmap at the worst frame — Clicking a peak in the deviation timeline jumps to that frame: the heatmap shows which part of the body causes it (here the trailing thigh).

Playback and clips

The playback bar has the Clip dropdown, the frame counter, previous / play / pause / next / loop, and a frame slider. The deviation timeline below it is covered in Animation-aware refinement.

Clips and Ranges panels — Clips (left) and Ranges (right). Ticked clips are evaluated and appear one after another on the timeline.

Clips: every loaded animation. The checkbox decides whether the clip is part of the error evaluation (and of refinement). Add animation / Remove animation manage the list.
Ranges: frame ranges you marked on the timeline, each with its surface and silhouette error (the 99th percentile over the range, so single outlier vertices are ignored). Checkboxes include or exclude a range.
The first frame of a clip is sometimes the bind (T) pose, where the error is zero.