View modes

View modes change how the Scene viewport shades your surfaces. Use them to inspect a model's geometry, check where content lands, measure brightness or see what each projector covers.

The mode buttons sit in the floating toolbar at the top center of the Scene viewport, after the tool and gizmo buttons: Mesh, UV, Lux and Beams. After them, PJ View looks through the selected projector (P).

Mode	Shows	Use it to
Mesh	Each model's geometry, without media or projector light: vertices as dots, edges as lines and the surface as a flat shaded fill, each switchable and in its own color	See a model's structure, and read selections and warp handles without a busy image behind them
UV	Media mapped onto the surface by its texture coordinates, in its own colors, with no lighting from the viewport or the projectors	Check that content lands on the model the way the designer intended
Lux	A false-color heatmap of the illuminance on the surface	Check brightness in real photometric units: lux or foot-candles
Beams	The same media as UV, but only where a projector's light reaches	Check coverage, shadows and overlap before you trust an alignment

The view mode is a personal setting, saved to your account on every device you sign in on, along with your Mesh settings. It doesn't change what other operators see or what the projectors output.

Every shown surface takes the mode

Every mode draws every shown surface, lit by every projector. Surfaces cast shadows onto each other, and the Lux statistics cover them all. A surface you hide with its eye in the scene graph isn't drawn, so it neither takes light nor blocks it.

UV

UV maps the media straight onto the surface through its texture coordinates, at full strength everywhere, whether or not a projector reaches that part of the model. The colors are exactly the content's own: a red of 255 shows as 255 on every face, whichever way the face points.

Use UV for content questions. Is the video on the right face? Is it the right way up? Does it repeat where it should? Projectors play no part in this mode, so changing one doesn't change what UV shows.

Mesh

Mesh draws each shown model as plain geometry, without media or projector light. Projectors, their beams, the gizmos and the selection boxes still appear, as in every mode. Mesh changes only the viewport; to put a white field on the wall, use a test pattern.

While Mesh is on, a ▾ beside its button opens a menu of what Mesh draws, each item with a color swatch. Click an item to switch it on or off:

Item	Draws	Default
Points	Every vertex, as a small dot	Off, near white
Lines	The edges of every triangle, as thin lines	On, light blue-gray
Fill	The surface, as a flat shaded color	On, neutral gray
X-ray	Makes the fill see-through, so the points and lines behind it show	Off

Click a swatch to change that part's color. One of Points, Lines and Fill always stays on. The menu stays open while you work and closes when you press Esc or click elsewhere. Your choices are saved.

Use Mesh to check a model before you warp it: how many vertices a part has, whether a face is one large triangle or a fine grid, and where a scan's seams run. Even with the fill off, the near side of a model hides its far side, so a dense model stays readable; turn on X-ray to see through it. Points and lines follow each vertex as you warp it. Soft-selection falloff, warp handles and the model's silhouette are also much easier to read against a neutral fill than against moving video.

Mesh replaced the Outlines and Solid modes in October 2026. A saved Solid view opens as the fill alone in its color, and a saved Outlines view as points and lines.

Beams

Beams shows the same media as UV, but only where a projector's light reaches the surface. A point is lit when it is:

• inside a projector's beam,
• facing that projector, and
• not blocked by other geometry in the scene.

Everything else is black, so you can see at once what no projector reaches. Where projectors overlap, their light adds up, so overlaps look brighter than single coverage.

Blend, beside the mode buttons in Beams and Lux, shows the light after each projector's Moonblend layer, with the same fade the outputs apply. With a good blend, the bright overlap disappears, and in Lux the statistics and the cursor readout measure the blended light. Blend is the project's Moonblend switch, the same as On beside Moonblend in the Mask tab, so it switches the blend on the projectors too and the view always matches the wall. If Moonblend hasn't been calculated, or the last calculation failed, turning Blend on calculates it.

Within a beam, parts of the surface closer to the lens look brighter than parts farther away, and surfaces angled away from the beam look dimmer than surfaces facing it. A projector's Brightness scales its whole contribution.

A projector's 4-corner keystone counts too, as it does for Moonblend, because the keystone stands for where the projector hangs. A keystone that squeezes the picture looks slightly dimmer, as a projector standing farther back would, and one that only straightens the aim looks the same. Bends from a bezier mesh inside the corners move the picture but not the light, so they change nothing here. While the blend recalculates after a warp edit, the view keeps the previous blend and the toolbar shows Calculating….

Beams was called Projection before October 2026.

Note

Beams previews coverage; it doesn't measure brightness. Each projector is normalized so that its Brightness is what you see where its beam meets the surface. Moving a projector farther back doesn't dim the preview, and its rated lumens play no part. For absolute brightness, use Lux.

Taking a projector out of the preview

Select a projector, then use these toggles in the Scene tab's Properties panel:

Toggle	Effect
Projection Preview	Mutes this projector in the preview, so the surface is shaded as if it weren't there. Mute the others to see what one projector covers on its own. Click again to bring it back.
Frustum Preview	Hides only the projector's beam wireframe in the 3D view. Coverage doesn't change.

Muting applies to Beams and Lux together. In UV mode the toggle is dimmed, because projectors play no part there.

Note

The preview shades up to 48 projectors at once. Muted projectors are left out first, then the first 48 of the rest, in projector-list order, light the surface.

Lux

Lux mode turns the viewport into a light meter. It colors each point of the surface by how much light lands there, in lux (lumens per square meter), instead of showing your media. While it's on, a legend, live statistics and the controls appear in the bottom-right corner of the viewport, and a readout follows the pointer.

Use it for questions you can't judge by eye. Is the far end of the wall bright enough? How much light is lost at this angle? How hot is the double-covered seam? Is a 5,000-lumen projector enough at this throw?

What it measures

For each projector that isn't muted, Moonshine works out how its luminous flux spreads across the beam and how much lands on each point of the surface, allowing for distance and the angle the surface presents to the beam. Contributions from all projectors are added before coloring, so a two-projector overlap reads about twice as bright as either projector alone.

The result is incident illuminance: the light arriving at the surface. It doesn't predict how bright the screen will look, which also depends on the surface's gain and color.

Set this up first

Lux readings are only as accurate as the rig details you enter:

Input	Where	Why it matters
Lumens (ANSI)	Projector settings	The rated light output, and the biggest factor in the result.
Brightness	Projector settings	A 0–1 dimmer on the rated output. 1 is full.
Throw Ratio	Projector settings or the Properties panel	How tightly the light is concentrated. A long lens puts the same lumens on a smaller area, so lux goes up.
Resolution	Projector settings	Sets the image aspect, which shapes the beam.
Projector position and rotation	Properties panel or the viewport gizmo	Distance and angle of incidence drive the falloff.
Model scale	Your source model	Distances are read in meters. A model at the wrong scale gives lux values that look plausible and are wrong.

Warning

Build the scene at true size. Illuminance falls off with the square of distance, so a room modeled at a tenth of its real size reports about a hundred times too much light.

The legend

The vertical color bar to the right of the panel is the scale. The top label is your Max, the bottom your Min, and the middle the midpoint: arithmetic on a linear scale, geometric on a log scale. Values are in the unit you've selected.

Controls

Control	What it does
Min / Max	The ends of the color scale, in the active unit. Values below Min take the bottom color, and values above Max the top color.
Auto	Fits the scale to the surface being measured: the bottom to zero (or the measured minimum on a log scale), the top to a round number above the measured maximum. It has no effect while no projector reaches the surface.
Linear / Log	How the colors spread across the range. Linear suits comparing values in a narrow band. Log spreads out the dark end when your rig covers several orders of magnitude.
lx / fc	The display unit: lux or foot-candles. Switching converts every readout, the legend and the Min/Max fields.
Turbo / Viridis	The color ramp. Turbo is high-contrast and shows hot spots quickly. Viridis is perceptually uniform, better for judging gradients and safe for color-blind viewers.
Isolux	Draws contour lines every 100 lux, like elevation lines on a map, to show the shape of the falloff.

These settings are saved on this device. A new device starts at 0–1000 lx, Linear and Turbo, with Isolux off.

Surface statistics

The panel above the controls reports on the whole illuminated surface, updating a few times a second:

Reading	Meaning
Min	The dimmest lit point on the surface
Avg	The area-weighted mean across the lit part of the surface
Max	The brightest point
Uniformity	Min divided by Avg, as a percentage: the ANSI-style uniformity figure you'd quote in a spec, over the lit area
Cover	The share of the surface reached by at least one projector

Min, Avg and Uniformity count only lit points, so read them alongside Cover: a surface that's half dark can still report good uniformity for the half that's lit.

The panel can also show:

• Illuminance — sampling…: no result yet, usually for a frame or two after you enter the mode or load a model.
• No surface illuminated: there's geometry, but no projector reaches it. Check the aim, the throw ratio and whether the projectors you expect are muted.

The hover light meter

Move the pointer over the surface and a small readout follows it, showing the illuminance at that point in the active unit. Points no projector reaches read — (unlit).

Use it to spot-check places a single figure can't describe: the seam between two projectors, the corner farthest from the lens, the spot where a truss casts a shadow.

Note

The hover readout and the statistics panel ignore obstructions, while the heatmap colors account for them. If a readout is higher than the color under the pointer suggests, something is blocking that beam.

While you are moving a surface

The heatmap and statistics keep updating while you drag a surface or a projector with the gizmo, so you can watch the light change. The hover readout hides while you drag a surface and returns when you let go.

Why two projectors read differently

Two projectors with the same settings, at the same distance from the same surface, read the same. For example, two 3,000-lumen projectors at a 1.5 throw ratio, 12 m and 12.02 m from a wall, read 89.3 lx and 89.0 lx at the center of their images. If yours differ by more than that, one of these settings differs between them:

Setting	Effect on the reading
Lumens (ANSI)	The reading scales with it: 6,000 lumens reads twice as much as 3,000. Choosing a model from the projector library sets that model's lumens.
Throw Ratio	A longer throw makes a smaller, brighter image. At the same distance, the reading scales with the square of the ratio: a 1.8 throw reads 1.44 times a 1.5 throw.
Brightness, Contrast, Gamma, Gain	These dim the picture, and the light falls faster than the setting: a brightness of 0.8 gives 61% of the light.
Rotation	A beam that meets the surface at an angle spreads over more of it. At 30° off square and the same throw distance, it reads 87% as much at its center, and less at its far side.
Keystone or warp	No effect. Lux measures the light from the lens where the projector stands, and a warp moves the picture, not the light. Beams shows how a keystone affects the light.
Blend	With Blend on, each projector reads the share of its light that Moonblend leaves it, which is less where it overlaps another. Turn Blend off to compare the projectors themselves.

To trace a reading to one projector, mute the others with Projection Preview and hover over the same point.

A working method

1. Set every projector's Lumens (ANSI) and Brightness to match the real rig.
2. Switch to Lux and press Auto to fit the scale to your values.
3. Read Cover first. Anything under 100% means part of the surface is dark: fix the aim or add a projector before you worry about brightness.
4. Read Uniformity. A low figure means the surface is bright in one place and dim in another, usually from a raking angle or a projector that's too close.
5. Turn on Isolux and look at the spacing of the contours. Tightly packed lines mark a fast falloff, which an audience will see as a bright edge.
6. Hover over the seams between projectors to check that the overlaps are where you intended and aren't stacking into a hot band.
7. Mute projectors one at a time with Projection Preview to trace any surprise to a specific projector.