Core concepts
The handful of ideas that make everything else click: scenes and nodes, pages and sites, the three kinds of "save", and how coordinates work.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
3dCMS has its own vocabulary, but it's small. Learn these six ideas and the rest of the manual reads easily.
Scenes and nodes
A scene is your 3D document. Everything in it is a node: a box, a sphere, a camera, a lamp, a particle emitter, a chunk of 3D text, a group, or an imported web page. Nodes live in a tree (parents and children), which you manage in the Scene Tree. Select a node and the Properties panel shows what you can change about it.
The creatable node types are: geometry (the five primitives + imported meshes), 3D text, NURBS curves, cameras, particles, force fields, lights (placeable point, spot & area lamps), shadow pools, groups, and web-page surfaces. Every scene also has a shared sun & sky underneath, configured in Settings ▸ Lighting.
Pages and page surfaces
A page surface (or "web page" node) is a special panel-shaped node that represents one page of content: a hero, some copy, images, links, SEO fields. When you import a website, each crawled page becomes one page surface. A scene with several pages becomes a navigable, multi-page 3D site, complete with a tour and per-page SEO.
Sites
A site is a published destination with its own URL. One account can host many named sites side by side. When you publish, you publish to the active site, and it goes live at a memorable, handle-based URL.
The three kinds of "save"
This one genuinely confuses people, so here it is plainly. There are three places your work can live:
| Kind | Lives in | Survives a new device? | Public? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Autosave (working draft) | this browser | No | No |
| Source scene (Save As) | your account, on the server | Yes | No, until you publish |
| Published site (Publish) | the public web | Yes | Yes |
Autosave catches your work every few seconds so a refresh never loses it, but it's tied to this one browser. Save As stores an editable copy on your account that you can open from anywhere. Publish produces the public, crawlable page. They're independent: editing your scene doesn't change the published site until you publish again. Full details →
Coordinates: Y is up, units are meters
3dCMS uses a Y-up world: the green axis points to the sky, and the ground sits at about y = 0. Distances are roughly meters, so a default box is about a meter and a half across. Think at human scale and your scenes will feel right. Colors are hex (#a8ca4f).
One action = one Undo
3dCMS batches related changes so they undo together. A gizmo drag, a burst of typing in a number field, or a whole Assistant edit ("add 42 cubes") each collapse into a single Undo step. So Ctrl+Z always does what you expect, and you can scrub the history with confidence.