Preview your scene with path tracing

Want to see how the devices reflect each other before saving an image? Rendered View progressively refines your scene with path tracing. This feature is experimental.

Rotato Cinema requires an Apple silicon Mac running Rotato natively, without Rosetta. On Intel, use Rotato.

Turn on Rendered View

1. Click the small shaded-circle icon beside the aspect picker above the canvas. You can also choose View > Rendered View (Experimental).
2. The icon takes the active color. Leave the camera still while the image becomes clearer.
3. Move the camera or a device to adjust the composition. The preview uses a coarser image while you drag, then refines when you stop. Timeline playback uses Realtime.
4. Save your project. Rotato remembers whether Rendered View is on for this document.

Click the icon again to return to Realtime. Each document keeps its own choice.

Add studio shadows

Choose Custom or Custom bottom in the scene's Shadows settings. In Rendered View, a studio light setup produces reflections, contact shadows and softer shadows as devices move away from the ground. Softness changes the size of the studio lights; Intensity changes how strongly the ground shadow appears over your background.

The ground is a physical surface. Moving its offset through a device can hide the intersecting part. Realtime uses the existing shadow effect, so the two views can differ.

Choose how to export

Turning on Rendered View also enables native path tracing for image and movie exports, including Quick Image Export and copied images.

For a rendered preview with faster Realtime exports, open Image or Movie (then More for movies), uncheck Use Rotato Cinema for exports, and accept the dialog. Canceling leaves the saved choice unchanged. The export choice applies to both images and movies and stays with this document, even after switching Rendered View off and on.

Image and movie samples and denoising remain separate. PNG sequences and Lottie use their existing Realtime export path. See path-traced images and path-traced movies for quality settings.