⚠️ Alpha · testnets only. ChainRender is in active alpha and deployed on testnets only — Ethereum Sepolia, the Robinhood Chain Testnet, and the Circle Arc Testnet — not on any mainnet. Contracts, addresses, and APIs may change. Do not use with real funds or production assets.
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Concepts

Advanced Scenes, 3D & Effects

Beyond charts and generative art, ChainRender has a deep scene system for 3D, animated, interactive, and post-processed visuals — all with an on-chain floor. This page surveys the advanced capabilities. They're powerful but specialized; most apps won't need them, but they're there when you do.

SceneIR: the scene format

ChainRender scenes are described in a versioned SceneIR (scene intermediate representation) — a declarative, on-chain format that has evolved through several capability layers, all in the built SceneFormat:

  • Motion — parameters driven by TIME (animation) declaratively, not by a script loop.
  • Interaction — bounded affordances that map INPUT → a parameter (a slider that rotates a model, a hover that highlights) — interactive scenes without arbitrary code.
  • State / generativity — scenes that carry state and generate content deterministically.
  • Material IR — procedural surface materials (how a surface looks: color, roughness, pattern) as data.
  • Skeleton IR — skeletal posing/skinning for SDF forms (the "rig a character" answer, on-chain).
  • Spatial 3D — components situated in 3D space (composition-v2 spatial placement).
  • Anisotropic primitives — direction-dependent shapes for richer geometry.

Every scene has a poster floor: a complete, bit-exact, fully on-chain render (Grade A). The richer, animated, or GPU-accelerated version is an enhancement over that floor and fails closed to it — see The Floor.

SDF scenes & point clouds

  • SDF (signed-distance-field) scenes render 2D/3D geometry from mathematical distance fields — an on-chain poster floor plus an optional GPU ray-march enhancement.
  • Point clouds render point-based scenes with the same floor + enhancement model.

Both are declarative (math and data, not a program), so they're analyzable and Grade A at the floor.

The effects library (post-processing)

The EffectPresetRegistry provides a library of post-processing effects — CRT, glass, vignette, scanlines, grain, and more — applied as an effect stack over a rendered scene. Effects are:

  • Content-addressed presets — reusable, referenced by hash.
  • Floored — each effect has an SVG-filter floor, so the effect applies on-chain (not only as a GPU shader).
  • Composable — stack multiple effects; the stack is data.

Fullscreen presentation mode

Scenes support a fullscreen presentation mode with adaptive resolution — a scene can render at a higher resolution when shown fullscreen, scaling its detail to the viewport, while keeping the same on-chain floor.

The on-chain compositor

The CompositionRouter is an on-chain compositor: it composes multiple components/scenes into one output via sockets — named slots a child component plugs into. This is how spatial compositions and layered scenes are assembled on-chain, generically.

When to use these

Most apps use the simpler primitives (charts, tables, generative art, identicons). Reach for the advanced scene system when you're building genuinely 3D, animated, interactive, or cinematically-styled on-chain experiences — an animated identity sigil, a 3D data visualization, a generative art piece with materials and motion. The floor guarantee means even these stay trustless: the rich version enhances a complete on-chain floor.

Related

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