Cameras & saved views

"Camera" means two different things in 3dCMS, and keeping them straight saves confusion:

• Saved views are your working camera bookmarks while editing (the 1–4 slots, see Moving around the viewport).
• Camera objects are nodes in the scene that define the viewpoint your visitors start from when they open the published page.

This article is about the second kind.

Adding and aiming a camera

Create a camera with Create ▸ Camera, then position it like any object. The Properties panel's Camera section gives you:

• Set Active Preview Camera: makes this the scene's active viewpoint. The active camera is where the published page (and the consumer preview) opens.
• View from camera: snaps your editor view to look through it, so you can frame the shot.
• Align to viewport: moves the camera to match your current editor view (frame it by eye, then lock it in).

Lens controls

The viewpoint a page drops you at

When a visitor navigates to a page in a published scene, the camera flies to an auto-framed pose: far enough back to see the whole page node. That is always correct and always generic: it has no idea which side of a room you meant them to walk in from.

A page can name a camera to arrive at instead. Select the page, and in the Page Surface section of Properties pick one from Arrive at viewpoint, a dropdown listing every camera in the scene, with Auto-frame (default) at the top. Every route into that page (a link sign, a deep link to /3d/<slug>, the page tour's next, even the browser Back button) then lands on that composed shot. Reset view returns there too, rather than to a frame the visitor never saw.

• It goes on the page, not on the signs. One field covers every way in. Aiming individual link signs at a viewpoint instead would fix only the doors, and would leave the URL and page title describing the room the visitor just left.
• Empty is the default, and keeps the existing auto-frame exactly: nothing changes for a scene that never sets it.
• It fails safe. If the id doesn't resolve, doesn't point at a camera, or holds a nonsense pose, the page falls back to auto-framing. Delete the camera it names and the dropdown says so, ⚠ missing viewpoint (auto-framing), rather than quietly resetting itself, because losing the reference is how you find out the camera is gone.
• The lens comes with it. The camera's field of view is honoured on arrival, so a 20° telephoto shot arrives as a telephoto shot, not re-rendered at the default 42°.
• A deep link paints it directly. Opening /3d/<slug> renders the composed shot on the first frame rather than framing the generic view and then swooping to it.
• It doesn't read as "zoomed in". Arriving at a close viewpoint used to leave the runtime believing the visitor had zoomed into something, which stalled guided scroll, showed a Return-to-default-view ✕ that did nothing, and nudged the camera back off the shot. The framing now sets the reference distance, so an arrival pose is simply where home is.
• The room lights itself. Neighborhood scoping follows the camera, so arriving at a viewpoint deep inside a room switches that room on as normal, and the page you navigated to holds the room even when a neighbour's centre happens to be nearer.

The Assistant and Claude over MCP can set it too: ask them to give a page an arrival camera, and they can create the camera and wire it in the same turn.

Where visitors spawn: the Entry point

A scene has exactly one spawn point, and you can put it on either kind of node:

• Select a camera and click Set as Entry Camera in the Camera section of Properties. Once set, the button reads ★ Entry Camera (visitors spawn here).
• Select a page surface and click Set as Entry page at the top of its Page Surface section. Visitors then open the scene framing that page.

The two share one slot: flagging either clears whatever held it before, so you can never end up with two competing spawns. Both outrank the editor camera captured at publish time, and a pinned Settings ▸ Visitor Spawn outranks both.

An Entry page also decides what the bare site URL is about. Its title becomes the browser title, its description and canonical go into the page's <head>, and its words are what the crawlable scaffold, the plain-text view, llms.txt and the sitemap all present as the root document, along with the HUD label and the page menu. With no Entry page set, the root URL means the page flagged as home, or failing that the first page in the scene. So the marker moves the whole document rather than just the camera: the page a visitor lands on and the page a crawler is told about stay the same page.

Idle camera drift

A camera that sits perfectly still reads as slightly dead: real footage always has a little life in it. Settings ▸ Viewport Feel ▸ Idle camera motion adds a subtle handheld float to the camera in your published scene: a slow, layered drift of a few centimetres that never quite repeats.

The slider runs from 0 (off, the default) to 1. Even at full strength the movement is small and deliberately gentle. It fades out the instant a visitor starts moving the camera themselves and eases back in once they let go, so it never fights their input, and it's switched off entirely when reduced motion is in effect, whether that's the visitor's own system setting or the scene's reduce-motion toggle. It affects the published view only; your editor camera stays rock steady.