---
title: Info Bar
order: 5
---

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](../index.md#first-run-shader-compilation).
- **"Chisel: 2/4"**: the frame is climbing the [progressive refinement](../render-engine/performance.md#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](../primitives/mesh.md#when-a-grid-does-not-fit).

## 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](../render-engine/quality.md#brick-memory-full).
- **"SDF is stale — mesh edited"** and **"Shown as placeholder"** in the object panel of a mesh shape, see [Mesh Primitive](../primitives/mesh.md).
- **"This cage folds…"** on a Lattice modifier: see [Lattice](../modifiers/lattice.md#folding).
- 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

- [Preferences](../preferences.md): library status, GPU backend, shader cache
- [Render Engine](../render-engine/index.md): engine settings