The editor at a glance
A guided tour of the workbench: the menu bar, the viewport, the docks, the Tools rail, and the floating panels you open from the Windows menu.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
The 3dCMS editor is a three-part workbench: a menu bar across the top, the viewport in the middle, and panels that float over the viewport or dock to the sides. Here's the lay of the land.
The menu bar
The strip along the top holds every command, grouped into menus:
| Menu | What's inside |
|---|---|
| File | New, Open, Save, Save As, Import a website, Import a model, Preview, and Publish. |
| Viewport | Render modes (Shaded / Clay / Flat / Wire), Scene stats, Isolate selection, camera markers. |
| Camera | Projection presets (Perspective / Ortho / Top / Front / Side) and your four saved Views. |
| Transform | Switch Move / Rotate / Scale, toggle World vs Local space, center the pivot. |
| Poly | The polygon modeling toolset — only lights up when an editable primitive is selected. |
| Create | Add objects: primitives, text, particles, force fields, cameras, NURBS curves, groups. |
| Edit | Group, Duplicate, Delete. |
| Windows | Open or close any panel (Scene Tree, Properties, Materials, Assistant, and more). |
| History | Undo, Redo, and the step list. |
| Help | Keyboard shortcuts, a per-window help index, the compatibility checker, and bug/feature links. |
On a phone, the menu bar collapses into a single Menu drawer button.
The panels
Everything that isn't the viewport is a panel (an internal "window"). Open any of them from the Windows menu. Two are open by default: Properties (docked right) and Tools (floating).
| Panel | Does |
|---|---|
| Scene Tree | The hierarchy of everything in your scene — select, rename, group, hide, reparent. Details → |
| Properties | Edits the selected object: its transform plus type-specific controls. Details → |
| Tools | A slim rail with Move / Rotate / Scale, a Create button, and an assign-material button. |
| Material Assets | Your material library and the preset starter kit. Details → |
| Material Graph | The 2D node editor for physically-based materials. Details → |
| UV Editor | Tiling and offset for textures. Details → |
| Asset Library | Your uploaded images, models, audio, and HDRIs. Details → |
| Assistant | The in-editor AI chat that edits your scene. Details → |
| Settings | Lighting, environment, sites, deployment, accessibility, and the AI keys. Details → |
| Keyboard Shortcuts | A live cheat-sheet. Also opens with ?. |
Floating, docking, and maximizing
Drag a panel by its title bar. Push it toward a screen edge and it auto-docks there (left, right, or bottom); drag it back toward the center to float it again. Panels can be resized from the corner and maximized to fill the workspace (press Esc to un-maximize). On mobile, stacked panels are capped to a scrollable column so they never bury the viewport.
The viewport HUD
Floating over the bottom of the viewport is a small History HUD: an Undo arrow, a history dot (click it to open the step list), a Redo arrow, a daylight (sun) toggle, and a Settings gear. You can hide this HUD in Settings if you like a clean canvas.