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The AI Assistant

Meet the Assistant

A built-in chat panel where Claude makes real edits to your scene. Bring your own Anthropic key. It stays in your browser.

Open in the interactive manual →

The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.

The Assistant is a chat panel inside the editor where you describe what you want and Claude actually edits your scene: adding objects, recoloring, arranging, grouping. Each thing it does lands as a single, tidy Undo step, so you're always in control.

Bring your own key

The Assistant runs on your Anthropic API key, kept only in your browser. Each request carries it through the 3dCMS relay to Anthropic (the relay holds the tool contract and the scene summary), and the key is never logged or stored on the server.

  1. Get an Anthropic API key

    Create one at console.anthropic.com. (This is the pay-as-you-go API, separate from a Claude subscription.)

  2. Paste it into Settings

    Open Settings ▸ AI Assistant and paste the key (it starts with sk-ant-). It saves as you type.

  3. Open the Assistant

    Windows ▸ Assistant. It flips out of its placeholder state the moment a key is present. No reload needed.

What it costs You pay Anthropic directly, and it's cents-scale: a simple edit on a small scene is a cent or two on the default Sonnet model, and a bigger scene costs more per message because the whole scene summary travels with every one (a few hundred objects is about ten cents a message). Letting it see the viewport means two or three calls per message rather than one, so it roughly doubles that. (This is different from AI generation, which spends real dollars on a separate fal.ai key. That's opt-in and off by default.)

Prefer to drive 3dCMS from Claude Desktop or Claude Code on your existing subscription instead? That's the MCP server.

Where managed AI is switched on, a paid plan may not need a key Where a deployment has managed AI switched on (this one does not yet), paid plans can include managed AI, which runs the Assistant on 3dCMS's own key and meters it against a monthly pool of credits. No Anthropic key to create or paste. Bringing your own key still works and stays unmetered.

AI keys at a glance

3dCMS has three independent AI features, each with its own key and its own setup page, so if you're hunting for the right one to paste:

FeatureKeySet it up in…
In-editor Assistant (this page)Anthropic API key, sk-ant-…Settings ▸ AI Assistant (steps above)
AI generation: new models & materialsfal.ai key, key_id:key_secretTurning on AI generation
Drive from Claude Desktop / Code3dCMS token, tdcms_…Generate a token, then connect Claude

The Anthropic and fal keys live only in your browser; the tdcms_… token authorizes Claude from outside the editor (the server keeps just a hash of it).

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