Studio Queues Team · Last updated June 24, 2026
Optimize your OBS setup for commission art streams with dedicated scenes for intro, work, chat, queue, and outro modes. Stream smoothly without alt-tabbing.
Your OBS setup is whatever you put together the first time you went live. One scene. Tablet capture, webcam in the corner, a chat overlay floating somewhere, maybe an alerts source you forgot to mute. It worked when you were just streaming art. Then you started taking commissions live, and the seams started showing.
You swap between tabs mid-stroke. Your reference is in a Discord DM somewhere. When chat asks where they are in the queue, you alt-tab to a Trello board nobody can read, scroll to find them, and go back to drawing. The intro segment where you talk to chat and the focused work where you don't want to are happening in the same scene with the same layout. The whole thing is held together with vibes.
This post is the scene structure that actually works for commission streams. Specific scenes, browser sources for the queue, the audio routing that lets you have music without it fighting your mic, the source order that stops OBS from crashing every time you reload, and the settings that matter for line art rather than for shooters.
A gaming stream is one mode. You're playing the game, your face is small, your chat readout is small, and the game is the show. Commission work is at least three modes layered on top of each other.
There's the intro and outro time, when you're talking to chat, your face matters, and there's no canvas. There's focused work, when you don't want chat scrolling on top of your reference. And there's queue or pricing time, when someone asks about commissions and you need to actually answer them with something visible.
One scene cannot do all three jobs. The compromise either makes the work hard to follow or the talking awkward, and the queue stuff is always tacked on with an alt-tab.
The fix is to stop trying to make one layout fit everything and build the modes as separate scenes you switch between with a hotkey.
Names are arbitrary, the roles aren't.
Starting soon. A scene you queue up before going live. Static image or simple animation, music bed, a "starting soon" tag. Solves the dead-air problem while you're getting set up. One source, usually a still image or a single browser source.
Just chatting. Webcam large, no canvas visible, chat readout sized so people can actually read what they typed. This is your intro, your outro, and the "let me answer questions" mode when somebody asks about your prices or your process.
Working, focus mode. Canvas dominant, webcam small in a corner, chat hidden or in a thin strip. This is your default working scene. The point of this scene is that nothing else on screen is bidding for your attention. No alerts. No popups. Chat is there if you glance at it, but it's not in your field of view while you're drawing.
Working, chat mode. Canvas still primary but smaller. Larger chat readout, webcam at a normal size. This is where you go when you want to actually engage with chat while you work. People can read what they're saying. You can see them without alt-tabbing.
Queue scene. Browser source pointing at your queue or commission page, plus a smaller webcam and chat. When someone asks "what does the queue look like" or "are commissions open," you switch to this for thirty seconds, answer the question, and switch back.
Be right back. For when you step away. Same idea as starting soon but labeled differently so chat knows what's happening.
Ending. Your outro scene. Music bed, social handles, a thank-you message. Switching to this signals to chat that the stream is wrapping up.
Seven scenes is the upper bound. You can collapse some if you want. The minimum useful set is starting soon, just chatting, working focus, queue, and ending. Five scenes covers it.
Bind each scene to a hotkey you can reach without looking. Numpad keys work well if you have a full keyboard. Otherwise the F-keys you don't use for anything else. The whole point of having scenes is that switching takes zero thought.
The queue scene needs a queue. A browser source pointing at a live URL that renders your current queue state is the cleanest way to do this, and the URL has to come from somewhere.
Studio Queues is built for exactly this case. The browser source URL sits in your dashboard under the overlay settings. You paste it into OBS once, and the queue updates on its own whenever you take a new commission or close one out. No file to edit, no JSON to manage, no Trello board to alt-tab to. The deeper walkthrough is at commission queue OBS overlay.
In OBS itself, add a browser source. Width and height to match the area you want it to take on the canvas (1280x720 if you want it filling most of the screen, smaller if it's an overlay strip). Set "Refresh browser when scene becomes active" so the queue is current every time you switch to that scene. Don't set the refresh interval to something aggressive like every five seconds, because that's a lot of network calls and you'll notice the flicker.
If you're not on a platform and want to roll your own, you can build something with a static HTML page that pulls from a Google Sheet or a small API. The browser source approach is the same, but you're maintaining the rendering and the data layer yourself. Works as a fallback, costs hours of setup time you'd otherwise spend drawing.
The same browser source approach works for an inline queue strip in your working scenes. Same URL, sized smaller and positioned so it doesn't cover anything important. People glance at it, see their position, and the question stops getting asked every fifteen minutes.
Most commission stream audio problems come from running everything on one bus. Your music is loud while you're drawing. You start talking. You can't lower the music without breaking the song. The mic ducks under it, chat asks you to repeat yourself, and you turn the music down for the rest of the stream.
The fix is to split the audio sources and treat them independently.
In OBS, set up these audio sources:
Mic. Your input device. Set noise suppression and a noise gate in the filters (RNNoise works well for most setups). Bind a push-to-talk if you want, but for art streams continuous capture is usually fine.
Music. A separate source. The cleanest way is to run your music in a dedicated app and capture it as Application Audio Capture (OBS 28 and later support this on Windows and Mac). Lets you control the music volume from inside OBS without alt-tabbing to your music app.
Voice chat. If you're on Discord with friends or co-streamers, route Discord's audio separately. Either through Application Audio Capture or via VoiceMeeter (Windows) or BlackHole (Mac) if you need more control. Reason: when you VOD review later, you want to be able to mute Discord without muting your music or your mic.
Alert sounds. If you have stream alerts, those should be their own source so the volume is controllable independently.
The filter chain that holds up on the mic: noise suppression first, then a compressor to even out levels, then a limiter as a safety. Defaults work fine for most setups, you don't need to chase studio quality.
For the master output, the rule that works is mic loud, music low, alerts middle. As a starting point: mic at a level where the meter peaks around minus 9 to minus 6 dB when you're talking normally, music sitting around minus 18 dB, alerts close to mic level so they cut through. Adjust to taste once you're listening to the actual VOD.
The order of sources in a scene matters more than it should. OBS draws from the bottom up. The bottom source is the background, the top source is the foreground. Standard.
What's less obvious: certain combinations crash OBS on scene reload. The common one is having a Game Capture or Display Capture stacked with a Window Capture of the same target. OBS gets confused about which one it's supposed to render and falls over. If your OBS dies every time you tweak a scene, this is usually it.
The order that's stable for an art stream:
Use Display Capture for screen-mirrored tablets where you want to show the whole screen. Use Window Capture if you want to show just the drawing app, which is cleaner because nothing on your other monitor leaks in.
If you have two monitors, set up Display Capture on the one your art is on, not the one your browser is on. Then your reference images and Discord don't end up on stream by accident.
If switching scenes requires reaching for the mouse, you won't do it mid-draw. The whole scene architecture fails. Bind hotkeys for at least these:
Pick keys you don't use in your drawing app. Numpad 1-5 works on full keyboards. F9, F10, F11 work almost everywhere. Test that the binding doesn't conflict with a shortcut in Krita or Photoshop or Procreate or whatever you draw in.
The scene switching itself is in Settings, then Hotkeys. Scroll to the scene you want, click into the "Switch to scene" field, press the key combination. Save.
The other binding worth setting up: push-to-talk if you're using one, or a quick mic mute that's easier to hit than the audio mixer toggle. Anything you want to do without leaving the canvas.
Art streams are visually different from gaming streams. Your canvas has fine detail that compresses badly at low bitrates. Your motion is slow, which means you can drop the frame rate without anyone noticing.
The settings worth tuning:
Resolution and FPS. 1080p30 is usually better than 1080p60 for art. The bitrate you save going from 60 to 30 frames goes into making each frame look better. Line art at 30fps is perfectly smooth. Nobody notices.
Bitrate. Twitch's published guidance for 1080p30 is around 4500 kbps. For 1080p60 they recommend 6000. Both currently cap at 8000 kbps. Use the upper end of those ranges, your stream will look noticeably better than the same content at 3000. (Confirm against Twitch's current ingest guidance before you finalize, the numbers update occasionally.)
Encoder. NVENC (if you have an Nvidia card) is fast and frees up your CPU for drawing. x264 on medium preset uses more CPU but tends to preserve fine detail slightly better. For commission streams where you're not running a game in the background, either works. If you have CPU headroom, x264 is worth a test recording.
Keyframe interval. Set to 2. Twitch requires it and your VODs need it for clean scrubbing.
Audio bitrate. 160 kbps is plenty. Going higher doesn't help and going lower starts to sound thin.
These are starting points. The right answer is whatever looks acceptable in your test recordings without dropping frames. The OBS auto-config wizard is fine for a baseline if you don't want to think about it.
The scene structure isn't the work. The scene structure is what gets out of the way so you can do the work.
When the queue is on a browser source, the question of "where am I in line" answers itself. When the focused work scene is one hotkey away, you don't lose the flow state every time you need to draw something hard. When the audio doesn't fight itself, you don't spend half the stream apologizing for the mix.
The overlay piece is the one most artists never solve cleanly. Studio Queues handles it with a single browser source URL that updates on its own as commissions move through the queue. Manual workarounds with spreadsheets, Trello boards, or hand-edited HTML files all work, but every one is something you have to maintain instead of draw. The trade is hours of setup and ongoing edits versus one paste.
Either way, the scenes are the thing. Build the modes once, bind the hotkeys, go back to drawing.
