Can the main viewport be disabled in gdscript?

Question

I am working on a space prototype which involves large world rendering. I have taken inspiration from Kerbal Space Program in that the world is split into multiple scenes of varying scales (in my case, a background scene, miniature scene & a real scale scene). All scenes are rendered to separate viewports and ordered back-to-front so as to display in the correct order onto the screen.

(image link in case it doesn't load here)

While this method works mostly as intended, I do believe the main viewport of the engine is still rendering in the background.

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Is there a way to disable rendering of the main viewport in gdscript?

If not, is there currently a way to access the depth of a viewport in gdscript (I haven't found anything documented anywhere for this) so as to allow for some custom compositig (e.g. via a shader) directly onto the main viewport?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I ended up capturing a frame of my prototype in Renderdoc and discovered that the main viewport was not being rendered again, to my relief.

In the image below, you can see that I have three colour passes, for three separate layers/viewports, with the final colour pass being the viewport textures being blitted onto the screen.

(image link in case it doesn't load here)

Maybe someone can confirm but I would venture a guess that because my root Spatial node has no actual renderables or cameras (see the scene graph I pasted in the original question), the viewport does not render anything other than the viewport container (which is exactly what I need it to do).