Kiln

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FAQ ​

Which browsers are supported? ​

Kiln requires WebGPU. Chrome/Edge 113+ and Safari 26+ support it out of the box. Firefox ships WebGPU by default in recent versions (141+), though support may be partial on some platforms — check dom.webgpu.enabled if needed. Make sure hardware acceleration is enabled in your browser settings.

If WebGPU is unavailable, KilnViewer.create() rejects with a descriptive error (e.g. "WebGPU not supported") rather than failing silently — the demo viewer surfaces that message on the page instead of showing a blank canvas.

Can Kiln read my data? ​

  • OME-Zarr (NGFF v0.4/v0.5) — compatible multiscale datasets load directly from a URL or local directory, with no Kiln-specific conversion. Input can be uint8, uint16, or float32 (not signed integers or float64); uint16 and float32 are converted to r16float internally.
  • Raw volumes (and other formats) are converted once to Kiln's compressed sharded binary format with the bundled CLI, then streamed the same way.
  • Full requirements are in the Data Guide.

Why won't my dataset load from S3 or my own server? ​

Almost always CORS. Kiln fetches data with cross-origin HTTP requests (including Range requests), so the bucket or server must return permissive CORS headers — Access-Control-Allow-Origin, and Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Range for sharded binary. See Hosting for streaming for the S3/CDN configuration.

How much VRAM does Kiln use? ​

Kiln uses a bounded GPU residency/atlas cache — ~1.3 GiB by default and configurable — for volume-residency resources (atlas texture + indirection table); this excludes render targets and other GPU allocations. See Architecture for the accounting.

What are the known rendering issues? ​

LOD transitions can produce brief visual discontinuities while bricks stream in. Brick boundary seams may be faintly visible in isosurface (ISO) mode, where normal estimation samples across brick edges. See Known Issues for the current list.

Can I use Kiln in my own application? ​

Yes. Install kiln-render from npm and use KilnViewer.create() — see the Quick start. Kiln is Apache 2.0 licensed.