Chisel
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Info Bar

Chisel reports its state in the 3D View header and the status bar, and warns about anything that might affect performance or correctness.

Viewport header

While the Chisel engine is active the header carries a short status:

  • “Chisel: compiling shaders…”: the first frames of a session, while the GPU builds the ray-marching pipelines. Wait a few seconds; see the shader compilation note.
  • “Chisel: 2/4”: the frame is climbing the progressive refinement ladder after you stopped moving. It disappears once the frame is at full quality.
  • “Chisel: 1 object shown as placeholder (GPU memory) — see object panel”: a mesh shape’s grid could not be shown and is drawn as a box. The object panel says why and offers Rebake to fit. See Mesh Primitive.

Status bar

During any drag (a gizmo, a pie modal, the draw tool) the status bar lists the live keys: Confirm (LMB), Cancel (RMB), Precision (Shift), Snap (Ctrl), and the modal’s own extras such as 1–5 for the profile, S for the chamfer smooth, F to flip a bisect, or Space to accept a polyline. The header shows the value being dragged (Blend [Round]: 0.120, Carve Offset: 0.150, Size: 0.842…).

A background bake reports there too: Chisel: baking SDF 40% (1/3) — Esc to cancel.

Pie menu warnings

The pie’s South-East wedge shows two warnings while they apply:

  • “Shaders not compiled, first run may take longer”: the first viewport frame is still compiling pipelines.
  • “OpenGL backend, Vulkan is much faster”: Blender is on OpenGL. Switch backend in Edit → Preferences → System → Backend for a large speedup.

Panel warnings

  • “Brick memory full — N cells stay coarse” in Render → Quality: the brick pool ran out; see Quality.
  • “SDF is stale — mesh edited” and “Shown as placeholder” in the object panel of a mesh shape, see Mesh Primitive.
  • “This cage folds…” on a Lattice modifier: see Lattice.
  • On Blender 5.x running OpenGL, the add-on preferences show a red “Blender is on the OpenGL backend — Chisel requires Vulkan” with a button that jumps to the System settings.

See also