Settings

The Settings section sits at the bottom of the OLS panel and provides global controls that affect your overall workflow. These options apply to your entire scene, not to individual lights or layers.

Max Samples

Controls the maximum number of render samples for your final Octane render. Higher values produce cleaner, noise-free images but take longer to render. During the creative lighting phase, you can keep this value low for faster feedback and increase it when you are ready for final output.

Max Preview

Controls the maximum number of samples for the Octane viewport preview. This is separate from the final render setting and directly affects how quickly your viewport updates as you make changes. A lower value  gives you faster interactive feedback while a higher value produces a cleaner preview. Finding the right balance depends on your GPU — start low and increase until you are comfortable with the preview quality during your workflow.

Clay Mode

Clay Mode is an Octane feature that overrides all materials in your scene, allowing you to evaluate your lighting without the distraction of complex material properties. Octane Light Studio gives you direct  access to this setting without having to navigate to the Octane render settings.

Three options are available:

• None disables the override and renders your scene normally with all materials intact.
• Grey replaces every material with a neutral grey diffuse surface. This strips away all colors,  reflections, transparency, and textures, leaving you with nothing but light and shadow on a uniform surface. It is the best option for judging the pure quality of your lighting — shadow softness, contrast ratios, and the overall balance between light and dark areas become immediately obvious.
• Color also overrides your materials, but it preserves the base diffuse color from the original materials. Complex material properties like reflections, glossiness, transparency, and subsurface scattering are removed, but you still see the underlying color of each object. This is useful when you want to evaluate lighting while keeping some visual distinction between different objects and surfaces.

 A common workflow is to start in Grey mode while building your lighting setup, switch to Color mode to check how the lights interact with the general color distribution in your scene, and then switch to None for the final evaluation with full materials.

White Light / Cam Gizmos

Toggles the color of light and camera gizmos in the viewport. When enabled, gizmos are drawn in white for better visibility against dark scenes. When disabled, gizmos are drawn in black, which is the default.  This is purely a visual helper that does not affect your lights or renders in any way.

Render Lights

Controls whether your lights are visible as objects in the final render. When enabled, the light sources themselves can appear in the rendered image. When disabled, lights still illuminate your scene normally  but are invisible in the render output. This is useful when you want clean renders without any light geometry showing up. Enabled by default.

Viewport Lights

Controls whether your lights are visible in the viewport rendered mode. When enabled, you can see the light objects in the viewport. When disabled, lights continue to illuminate the scene but the light objects  

 themselves are hidden from the viewport. This helps reduce visual clutter when working with many lights. Enabled by default.

Realtime Snapshots

This toggle controls whether changes to your lights are automatically written to the active snapshot. When turned on, every adjustment is instantly saved. When turned off, which is the default, changes remain temporary until you manually update the snapshot using the Update button. See the Snapshots page for a detailed explanation of both modes.

Viewport Overlays

Five toggles let you individually control which visual information is displayed in the 3D viewport:

• Light Names — toggles the display of light name labels on the beams.
• Geometry Name — toggles the display of the geometry name at the beam hit point.
• Intensity — toggles the display of intensity values above the beams of non-active lights.
• Tilt — toggles the yellow tilt angle label next to the light during Adjust mode.
• Geometry Highlight — toggles the blue hit dot that marks where the beam hits geometry.

These toggles give you full control over how much visual information is shown during your workflow.

Documentation

A link at the bottom of the Settings section opens the complete online documentation in your browser. This is what you see here now.