Reference
Glossary
Plain-English definitions for every bit of 3dCMS vocabulary you will meet in this manual.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
The whole 3dCMS vocabulary, defined once.
- Scene
- Your 3D document — everything in the editor.
- Node
- Any single thing in a scene: an object, camera, particle emitter, group, or page.
- Page surface
- A panel-shaped node holding one page of content (copy, images, links, SEO). The building block of multi-page 3D sites.
- Site
- A published destination with its own URL. One account can host several.
- Source scene
- An editable copy of a scene stored on your account (created with Save As). Survives across devices.
- Autosave
- The working draft kept automatically in your browser.
- Handle
- The personal part of your publish URLs (
3dcms.info/<handle>/…). Locked after your first publish. - Active site
- The site that Publish targets right now.
- Primary site
- The one site that also answers at your domain's root URLs.
- Primitive
- One of the five built-in parametric shapes: box, sphere, cylinder, plane, torus.
- Component mode
- The editing mode where you select a mesh's individual vertices, edges, and faces.
- Gizmo
- The on-screen handles you drag to move, rotate, or scale.
- Pivot
- The point an object rotates and scales around.
- NURBS
- A smooth spline curve you can revolve or loft into a surface.
- Material
- An object's surface, built from nodes in the material graph.
- ORMH
- A packed texture convention: Occlusion, Roughness, Metalness, Height in one image's channels.
- Particle emitter
- A node that sprays many small particles — smoke, sparks, grass.
- Force field
- An invisible field that pushes, pulls, or swirls nearby particles.
- Decimate / LOD
- Reducing a model's triangle count; LOD swaps in cheaper versions at a distance.
- Instancing
- Drawing many copies of one object in a single, cheap draw call.
- Semantic mirror
- The crawlable HTML version of every published page.
- Consumer view
- The fullscreen, chrome-free experience your visitors get.
- BYOK
- "Bring your own key" — the AI features run on your own Anthropic / fal.ai keys, stored only in your browser.
- MCP
- Model Context Protocol — the standard that lets Claude Desktop/Code drive your saved scenes.
- apply_ops
- The validated batch of edits the AI uses to change a scene. One batch = one Undo.
Spotted something off, or want a topic covered? Email buck.rackley@gmail.com.