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 lamps), 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 the intuitive thing, and you can scrub the history with confidence.