Using the Inspector

The inspector panel on the right side of the window gives access to material editing, stage metadata, and animation controls for your loaded model.

Showing and Hiding the Inspector

Click the Inspector button in the toolbar
Or press ⌘I

Materials Section

The Materials section lists every material in the loaded model. Click a material to expand it and edit its properties. For details on individual inputs and format conversion, see Editing Materials.

The inspector updates to reflect the selected object when you click something in the viewport.

Material Properties

Color / Diffuse: Base surface color or texture
Metallic: How metallic the surface appears (0 = plastic, 1 = metal)
Roughness: Surface smoothness (0 = mirror, 1 = fully diffuse)
Normal: Normal map for surface detail without changing geometry
Emissive: Self-illumination color
Opacity: Transparency (1 = fully opaque)
Occlusion: Ambient occlusion map

Material Format

Gantry shows which material format each material uses — USD Preview Surface, MaterialX, RealityKit, or OpenPBR. The “When editing” dropdown controls whether edits preserve the original format or convert to a different one.

Variants Section

If the loaded asset contains USD variant sets, a Variants section appears in the inspector. Variant sets let a single USD file contain multiple configurations of a model — for example, different colors, levels of detail, or component states.

Switching Variants

Each variant set is shown as a labeled dropdown. Choose a value from the dropdown to switch the active variant — the viewport updates in real time to reflect the selection.

Exporting with Variants

The active variant selection is applied at export time. Use Export Flattened to bake the chosen variant into a single self-contained file, or Export (Preserve Authorship) to keep the variant set intact in the output.

Stage Properties Section

The Stage Properties section at the bottom of the inspector shows scene-level USD metadata and lets you edit it directly. Changes are written as an edit layer and can be undone with ⌘Z.

Up Axis

A segmented control lets you switch the stage’s up axis between Y and Z. Most real-time engines (including RealityKit) expect Y-up. If your model appears lying on its side, switching to the correct up axis will fix the orientation.

Meters Per Unit

Sets the scene’s unit scale as a decimal value (e.g., 0.01 = centimeters, 0.001 = millimeters, 1.0 = meters). RealityKit expects meters (1.0). If your imported model appears very large or very small, adjusting this value corrects the scale.

Default Prim

Sets the USD stage’s default prim path — the root prim that consumers of the file will reference when no explicit path is given. Enter the full prim path (e.g., /Root). This is required for USDZ files that are referenced by other assets or loaded in Reality Composer Pro.

Runtime Capabilities

The Stage Properties section also displays the runtime capabilities detected on your machine: Hydra renderer, MaterialX, OpenColorIO, and ImageIO support. These are informational and reflect what is available for preview on the current system.