---
title: Quality
order: 1
---

The Quality group controls how rays advance through the scene at full quality (the settled frame, and the F12 camera render) plus how finely shapes are baked into the brick volumes the renderer marches through. Higher settings = sharper surfaces, slower frames. (The reduced settings used while you interact live in [Performance](performance.md).)

![Quality settings](../assets/rendersettings-quality.webp)

## Ray marching

- **Max Steps**: `16–4096`, default `64`. Maximum ray-marching iterations per pixel. Raise if surfaces look chunky at silhouettes; lower for speed.
- **Hit Threshold**: `0.0001–0.01`, default `0.001`. Distance under which a ray is considered to have hit. Lower = more precise contact, especially for thin features and tight corners.
- **Max Distance**: `10–1000`, default `100`. Hard cap on ray travel. Increase if far objects fade out unexpectedly.
- **Resolution**: `1–100%`, default `30%`. Internal resolution of the settled (full-quality) frame as a fraction of the viewport. Silhouettes and object-over-object edges are anti-aliased analytically at any resolution, so `30%` reads sharper than the number suggests; raise toward `100%` for pixel-exact stills, drop it for an instant speedup on a large monitor.

## Brick detail

Chisel bakes each shape into a sparse brick volume and marches that, instead of evaluating the full expression at every step. Two settings decide how fine those bricks are:

- **World Cell Size**: default `0.031 m` (1/32 of a Blender unit), soft max `1.0`. The finest cell edge. With [Auto Cell Size](performance.md#auto-cell-size) on (the default) this is the cell for a 1 m object and every object scales from its own size; with it off, one absolute cell size for the whole scene. Halve it for twice the surface detail at roughly eight times the memory.
- **Subdivision Level**: `0–4`, default `3`. Extra detail where booleans act. Bricks that overlap a cutter, a blend or an emboss halve their cell up to this many times below *World Cell Size*, and the overlap is re-checked at every level, so only bricks still touching the operand keep refining. Detail concentrates where booleans cut, blend or emboss instead of flooding the whole shell; objects with no booleans stay at the base cell whatever the level. `0` = uniform cells everywhere.

Subdivision Level replaces the per-object *Subdivision Bias* of 4.0. Files saved with per-object values open at level `3` and ignore the old setting.

While you drag, only the base level rebakes; the finer levels rebake when the drag settles.

### Brick memory full

When the brick pool cannot hold every refined cell, a red row appears under *Subdivision Level*:

> *Brick memory full — 12,480 cells stay coarse*

The scene still renders; the listed cells stay at coarser detail than the level asked for. Raise **Brick Pool** in [Preferences](../preferences.md#info) (*Auto* already picks the largest tier your card affords), lower *Subdivision Level*, or raise *World Cell Size*. The row clears on the next clean settle.

## See also

- [Performance](performance.md): Auto Cell Size, progressive refinement while you interact
- [Matcap](matcap.md): viewport shading