Chapter 9 — Settings

Edit → Settings… opens the Settings dialog, which docks alongside the main viewport so you can see edits live-update on a real model. The dialog has four tabs: Defaults, Rendering, License, and Experimental.

Settings persist to a JSON file (settings.json) in the app's per-user data directory — Windows AppData, macOS Application Support, etc. Edits save automatically; there's no "Apply" button.

Defaults tab

The Defaults tab controls global app preferences — UI text size and what File → New produces. Tweak these once and every fresh model starts the way you want.

Display

• UI text size — global multiplier for every label, control, panel header, and button in the app. Range 85 % – 150 %, default 100 %. Useful on high-DPI monitors (drop to 90 % to fit more on screen) or for accessibility / large-print (130 % – 150 %).
• Quick-set buttons land you on 100 % / 115 % / 130 % / 150 % in one click; the slider gives you 5 % granularity in between.
• Changes apply live and persist across sessions. Layouts are tested through the full range, but very small toolbars on narrow windows may wrap above ~140 %.

New Model Defaults

• Default Height (mm) / Default Diameter (mm) — starting size.
• Default Wall Thickness (mm) / Default Bottom Thickness (mm) — cavity-related defaults applied to new models.
• Default Closed Solid — most users want this on (a hollow vase).
• Default Open Top — keep on for vases, off for sealed bottles.

Quality Defaults

• Default Viewport Quality — Low / Medium / High / VeryHigh / Ultra. Higher = smoother in the editor but slower refresh; a textured body wants at least High to not alias.
• Default Export Quality — independent of viewport, used by File → Export. High is the sweet spot for most exports.

Default Printer Preset — picks the build plate for fresh models. The dropdown lists every preset from the Bambu / Prusa / Eazao / WASP / 3D Potter / Stoneflower catalogues plus Custom.

Default Surface Color — the clay tint shown in the viewport. The toolbar 🎨 picker overrides per-session; this sets the starting value for new models.

Library Folder — where saved-to-library projects live on disk. Browse… opens a native folder picker; ⟳ resets to the default location (~/Documents/DigitalClay Projects/).

Rendering tab

The Rendering tab is the studio. Every knob lives here so you can match a particular look (gallery white, terracotta sunset, dramatic gallery spot, etc.):

Material

• Roughness (0..1) — 0 = polished glaze, 1 = matte clay. 0.20 default.
• Metalness (0..1) — 0 = clay (default), 1 = mirror-finished glaze.
• Environment Map intensity (0..1) — how strongly the IBL contributes vs the direct lights. 0.7 default.

Environment

• Sky / Mid / Horizon / Ground colours — the four-stop gradient used to build the PMREM environment map. Drives reflections and IBL.

Lights

• Five-point studio lighting: Key, Side, Fill, Rim, Bounce. Each light has Position, Intensity, and Color. Defaults give the dramatic asymmetric rake you see on first launch.
• Hemisphere Sky / Ground — the ambient light. Two colours blend vertically across the model.

Tone-mapping & Output

• Tone Mapping — the curve used to compress HDR scene values into the 0..1 display range. ACES Filmic (default) gives a film-like shoulder; Reinhard is softer and forgiving; Cineon crushes blacks for moodier shots; Linear is raw with no tone curve; None disables tone mapping entirely.
• Output Color Space — sRGB (display) (default) is correct for any normal monitor; Linear (raw) disables the gamma curve and is useful only when comparing raw HDR values.
• Exposure (0.5..2) — overall brightness. 0.85 default produces flatter highlights on glazed clay.
• Shadow Type — PCF Soft (default) gives smooth shadow edges via percentage-closer filtering; PCF is sharper but cheaper; Basic is the fastest, hard-edged option.
• Shadow Map size — soft contact shadows. Higher = sharper shadows at the cost of memory.
• Background Mode — Env Map (default) shows the PMREM gradient; Solid Color uses the colour from the picker beside it; Transparent paints no background (useful for compositing screenshots).

Mesh & Material toggles

• Side — which face of each triangle is lit. Double (default) is safe for any mesh; Front is the smallest GPU cost when the model is closed and you don't need to see the back of cavities; Back flips the normals (debug aid for inverted meshes).
• Flat shading — uses face normals instead of vertex normals so every triangle reads as a flat plane. Looks polygonal — useful for a low-poly art style.
• Wireframe — same line-overlay used by the toolbar's Wire button (Chapter 1 — Getting Started). Toggling this checkbox or the toolbar button is equivalent.

Copy / Paste JSON

The bottom of the panel has Copy / Paste JSON buttons. Copy your favourite preset to the clipboard, paste into a Discord post or share it as a file — the JSON is a self-contained snapshot of every render setting.

License tab

Where you enter your purchased license key. Three states:

• No license / Demo — the app is in trial mode; certain features are read-only.
• License pending — you've entered a key and the server is validating.
• Licensed — feature unlock is active.

Click Browse… to load a .lic / .dat / .json license file from disk, or paste the key directly. The license file is portable — copying it to another machine of yours moves the activation. (See ../legal/LICENSING.md for the back-end issuance flow.)

Experimental tab

Three opt-in flags for in-development features. They work today but may evolve in future releases — accept the trade-off before flipping them on.

• 🏺 Pottery Wheel — exposes the Tools → Pottery Wheel entry. Real-time sculpting tools that spin the model and let you push, pull, carve, smooth, widen, narrow. See Chapter 3.
• ⎙ Printer path simulation — exposes the Printer sidebar tab. Layer-by-layer toolpath preview with gravity-aware droop prediction. Useful for "will this overhang collapse?" sanity checks before printing.
• ◬ Multi-Object Lofting — exposes the Lofting Mode dropdown in the Shape tab when you're in Lofting mode. Lets you place up to 8 primitives per layer with topology-changing transitions via SDF + Marching Tetrahedra. See Chapter 2.

Note on auto-enable: when you load a project that uses an experimental feature (e.g. a multi-object loft .t3d), the relevant flag is auto-enabled and an info dialog explains what was activated. You can disable it again here afterward; existing multi-object projects will continue to render correctly even with the flag off.

Where settings live on disk

The file is plain JSON — back it up by copying, restore by replacing. Click Save settings at the bottom of the dialog to force-write immediately if you suspect autoSave didn't fire.

What to read next

• Chapter 10 — Tips & Troubleshooting for common issues and performance tuning.
• Chapter 11 — Keyboard & Mouse Reference for the one-page input cheat sheet.