Exploring a published scene
The visitor's-eye view: how people move through your 3D site on desktop and mobile, and the controls they get for free.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
When someone opens your published link, they land in the consumer view, a clean, fullscreen experience with no editor chrome. You can see exactly what they'll see with File ▸ Preview.
The loading screen
3D scenes take a moment to arrive, so the first thing a visitor sees is a branded loading screen rather than a blank canvas. It carries:
- A determinate progress bar with a percentage, so the wait has a visible end. It never jumps backwards, and it gives up gracefully rather than hanging if something is slow.
- Your scene's name, so people know they're in the right place.
- A "how to move around" row tailored to the device it's actually running on: on a desktop it leads with Click objects to explore, then drag-to-look and scroll-to-zoom; on a touch screen it's tap, one finger to tumble, two to pan, pinch to zoom. Visitors arrive already knowing what to do.
- A card showing a real model from the 3dCMS asset library, and a small 3dCMS mark, quiet branding while the scene streams in.
If your scene uses corner joysticks for touch, the loader adds a line pointing them out, so nobody spends their first ten seconds hunting for the controls. The editor shows the same loader when you open a scene, with the editor's own Alt-drag camera hints instead.
Moving around
| Platform | Controls |
|---|---|
| Desktop | Drag to look around and move through the scene; on-screen hints point the way. |
| Keyboard | W A S D pan the camera, on every scene including single-page ones. See accessibility. |
| Mobile | Drag to orbit, swipe ← → to move between pages, and swipe up (when zoomed) to open a page's gallery. |
Page-stepping (the mobile swipe and the desktop ← → keys) belongs to multi-page scenes. In a single-page scene those gestures do nothing at all, and the on-screen hint stops advertising them, so nobody swipes at a site with nowhere to swipe to.
The table above is the default. Touch input mode in Settings ▸ Mobile & Touch offers two other answers to "what does a finger do here":
- Corner joysticks: an FPS-style pair of sticks, "Move" on the left and "Look" on the right.
- Guided scroll: a swipe up steps to the next section, the way a 2D page would, and dragging sideways looks around.
Tapping things
Objects you've given a tap action respond when a visitor taps them: opening in a fullscreen viewer, flying the camera over, or following a link. The cursor turns into a pointer over anything tappable, so people find them without a hint. Everything else stays scenery: a click on it does nothing.
Back and forward
A ← → pair sits at the top left of every visit: in the header bar on desktop, and at the left end of the slim top bar on phones and in embedded scenes, where there's no header to put it in. Both buttons are always there and simply grey out when there's nowhere to go, so a visitor looking for "how do I get back" finds the control in the same place either way. The arrows are drawn with a heavy head rather than set as a text glyph, so they stay legible as arrows over a bright or busy scene.
They work like the browser's own controls, but for your scene: Back returns to the previous page and the exact camera pose the visitor was at, so a tap-to-travel trip or a viewpoint jump is always reversible, and Forward flies them back to where they'd travelled. Forward is deliberately cautious: when 3dCMS can't be sure there's a view ahead it leaves the button greyed rather than offering one that does nothing. (The browser's own Back and Forward keep working regardless: these are the same history, just reachable without the browser chrome.)
The visitor's toolbar
On desktop the controls sit in a slim header along the top of the page. On phones and in embedded scenes there's no room for a header, so the same controls collapse onto one quiet translucent top bar: back / forward at the left, the 3dCMS brand pill centred on the bar, and a Menu pill at the right that opens the rest. Either way, visitors get:
In the desktop header the everyday actions are compact icons, because they sit in a row where five written labels would swamp it. Stacked inside the mobile Menu they'd be a column of bare glyphs instead, so there each row carries a written label ("Mute sound", "Search pages", "Fullscreen") on one shared row shape.
Share ↗ opens a small dialog with the page's link ready to copy, a QR code to point a phone at, and the same one-click share targets a creator gets, so a visitor who wants to pass your scene on doesn't have to fish the URL out of the address bar. It shares exactly where they are, page and all, minus any preview or measurement switches in the URL. If they're standing at a saved viewpoint, that survives too: a #view/<slug> link is the one spatial anchor a visitor can pass on, so "look at it from here" is shareable through the product's own share button.
Mute is remembered. The mute toggle is a fact about the person, not about one scene, so a visitor who silences a scene stays silenced, across page navigations, across visits, and across every 3dCMS site they open. Unmuting is equally sticky. (In a private window where storage is blocked it holds for the session instead.)
On a genuinely public visit the desktop header also carries a small "Made with 3dCMS" credit linking to the Explore gallery, an unobtrusive way for a visitor who likes your scene to discover more. It's shown only on published visits, never in your own draft preview. The compact top bar shows the 3dCMS brand pill in its place, on phones and in embeds alike; in an embed that pill opens your scene full-size and is joined by a Build your own → link. A paid plan hides all of them.
The next few pages cover the standouts: guided scroll, the tour, the search palette, visitor reactions, and the accessibility defaults.