FAQ

If you have a question that is not answered below, just join our Discord and we will get you an answer ASAP.


Known issues & limitations

Current limitations are mainly related to some features which are supported in the Saturn solver, but not the Atlas solver, and vice versa.

Saturn-specific limitations currently include:

  • Resume/cooperative rendering are not yet implemented.
  • Dielectric does not yet properly support addition of a Layer.
  • Diffraction and Bloom are not yet supported.

Atlas-specific limitations currently include:

  • Incomplete support for volumetric material and dielectric+scattering.
  • Sensor noise & film grain post-process nodes are not yet implemented.
  • Mesh booleans, and the dielectric Auto-boolean feature are not supported.
  • Extra passes (alpha, material, object, etc) must be done with Saturn.
  • IES lights are not yet supported.


What is a Seat license?

A Seat license authorizes the use of Bella GUI, CLI, and/or any desired plugin(s), on one machine, at any given time. It is not locked to any particular machine or operating system. It is intended for use by artists and content-creators.

This is a perpetual license, which will work with any version of Bella built within a year of the purchase date.


What is a Node license?

A Node license authorizes rendering with Bella (whether through the GUI or CLI) on one machine, at any given time. It is not locked to any particular machine or operating system. It does not authorize content creation through GUI and plugins, and is intended as a cost-reduced option to enable the creation of a private render farm.

This is a perpetual license, which will work with any version of Bella built within a year of the purchase date.


How do I install my license?

The Bella license consists of a small text document (available via the Orders page in your account), which may be installed by copy/paste using the Bella GUI's Help > License Info window, or by creating a text file containing the license text, at <home>/bella/bella.lic.


How do I demo Bella?

There is nothing special to do, as Bella will run in "demo" mode whenever it does not find a valid license on the machine. When this is the case, a few restrictions will be in place:

  • Output resolution is limited to 1080p (1920×1080, by area).
  • A small Bella watermark is rendered at lower-left on the image.
  • Resume-rendering and merging capabilities are deactivated.

Is Bella CPU-Only?

At this time Bella is CPU-only in its path tracing (we do use the GPU for various other tasks), but as all the code in Bella is very new and modern, we have of course had GPU in mind since writing the first line, and a hybrid CPU/GPU mode is currently under development.


What type of system is recommended?

Bella supports running on 64-bit machines and operating systems only. It is recommended to have at least 8GB of memory, but generally preferable to have 16GB or more. Bella itself is very compact, but using it may involve large files, so you should have plenty of disk space (preferably SSD) available.

For more details, please see the System Requirements section of the downloads page.


How do I do network rendering with Bella?

Bella does not have a built-in network render manager. Our area of expertise is in writing renderers, not in the type of networking code required to build a network manager from scratch, and our experience in the past has been that home-spun network rendering managers are generally the least reliable component of a rendering software.

Therefore we made the choice to focus on supplying a powerful CLI (Command-Line Interface) that can be used to integrate with existing industrial-strength third-party render farm managers, such as Deadline. For more information on this, see the #BELLA-CLI channels in our Discord.


Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime (Windows Only)

For plugins that do not use standalone installers (such as Rhino's .RHI and SketchUp's .RBZ), we have no opportunity to automatically install the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime upon which Bella software depends.

Your machine may already have the necessary runtime installed, but if not and/or you encounter any malfunction, please install the runtime, which is available on the downloads page.


Version 22.3.0? What?

Bella's public versioning model uses the convention [last 2 digits of year].[bella build number].[plugin build number].

This model is adopted both for its simplicity and technical compatibility with various 3rd-party solutions (installers, etc), and because we wish to pursue continuous development and a hype-free sales model that avoids artificial "major version" release rushes.