3dCMS Knowledge Base
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Every article in the 3dCMS Knowledge Base, grouped by section. Prefer to browse with search and a sidebar? Use the interactive manual.

Get Started

New here? Start with the five-minute quickstart, then get your bearings in the editor.

  • Welcome to 3dCMSA browser-based editor and CMS where every published page is a real, navigable 3D scene — and ships clean, crawlable HTML from the same URL.
  • Quickstart: your first sceneFrom a blank viewport to a published, shareable 3D page in about five minutes. Eight small steps, no prior 3D experience required.
  • Start from a templateSkip the blank viewport: clone a polished, ready-made scene into your account — already personalized with your name and photo — then reshape or publish it.
  • The editor at a glanceA 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.
  • Core conceptsThe handful of ideas that make everything else click: scenes and nodes, pages and sites, the three kinds of "save", and how coordinates work.
  • Moving around the viewportHow to orbit, pan, zoom, and frame your work on desktop and touch — plus camera bookmarks, view presets, and render modes.

Building Scenes

The everyday editor: adding objects, selecting them, moving them around, and keeping the scene organized.

  • Adding objectsFour ways to add things to a scene, the full menu of object types you can create, and the one object that works a little differently.
  • Selecting objectsClick, shift-click, and rubber-band selection, the Select menu (Select All, None, Invert, Hierarchy, Parent, Similar, by type) with its shortcuts, and what "primary" selection means.
  • Move, rotate & scaleThe three transform tools, world vs local space, where the pivot sits, snapping to a grid, and typing exact numbers.
  • The Scene TreeThe hierarchy panel: select, rename, reparent, hide, search, and the per-row quick actions — everything that keeps a big scene navigable.
  • The Properties panelThe Inspector edits whatever you have selected — its transform first, then controls specific to the object type.
  • Group, duplicate & deleteThe three housekeeping moves that keep scenes tidy — and the shortcuts worth committing to muscle memory.
  • Undo, redo & historyStep backward and forward — or jump straight to any earlier point in your editing session with the visual history list.
  • Cameras & saved viewsCamera objects set the viewpoint your visitors get; saved views are your own working bookmarks. They are not the same thing.
  • 3D textAdd crisp, readable type anywhere in your scene — with full control over size, alignment, and anchoring.
  • Tap actionsGive any object a job when a visitor taps it — open it in a fullscreen viewer, fly the camera over to it, or follow a link.
  • Animating objectsGive an object a looping motion — bob, spin, pulse, or sway — that plays for visitors without disturbing where you placed it.

Modeling

Reshape primitives into custom geometry with polygon tools, NURBS surfaces, and a decimator for keeping things light.

  • Edit mode: vertices, edges & facesDrop into component mode to grab the individual vertices, edges, and faces of a primitive — the gateway to all polygon modeling.
  • Polygon toolsThe full mesh-editing toolset — extrude, inset, loop cut, bevel, weld, bridge, and more — grouped by what you have selected.
  • The radial Poly wheelA gesture-driven quick menu that puts the right modeling tools under your cursor without a trip to the menu bar.
  • Parametric primitivesThe five built-in shapes and the size and segment parameters that reshape them — before you start poly modeling.
  • NURBS curves, revolve & loftDraw a spline, edit its control points, then spin it into a lathed surface or skin a surface across several curves.
  • Decimate & poly budgetsKeep big scenes fast: read poly counts everywhere they surface, and decimate heavy models down to a target triangle count.

Materials & Textures

Give your objects a surface — from one-click presets to a full physically-based node graph.

  • Materials & the libraryAssign a surface in one click from the starter library, manage your saved materials, and turn folders of textures into ready-made PBR packs.
  • The material node graphA visual, node-based editor for physically-based materials: wire color, roughness, normals, and more into a single output.
  • Textures & PBR packsHow images become materials, which formats are supported, and how 3dCMS streams textures so big scenes stay light on memory.
  • The UV editorVisualize how a texture wraps onto a primitive, and dial in tiling and offset per texture layer.

Effects & Atmosphere

The things that make a scene feel alive: particles, grass in the breeze, force fields, lighting, color grading, fog, and spatial sound.

  • ParticlesSmoke, sparks, dust, and grass from a single efficient emitter — start from a preset, then tune count, color, motion, and glow.
  • Grass, weeds & breezeTwo grass motions that root blades to the ground and ripple them in a wind — from cheap line-blades to lush tapered ribbons.
  • Force fieldsInvisible fields that push, pull, swirl, or roughen nearby particles — with per-emitter routing so each field affects only what you want.
  • Lighting: sun, sky & time of dayEvery scene has one shared sun and sky — a live time-of-day system or a fixed studio setup — that you can top up with placeable lamps.
  • Placeable lightsDrop point and spot lamps into a scene — with shadows, a day/night schedule, projected gobo patterns, and volumetric light shafts.
  • Color grading & LUTsPost-processing that sets the final look of the image — bloom and vignette, hue/saturation grading, and cinematic color LUTs (built-in or your own imported .cube / .3dl).
  • Background, fog & gridSet the backdrop color, add atmospheric fog, and control the reference grid — the scene-wide environment settings.
  • Distant backdropsA camera-centred environment sphere — mountains, a skyline, or a gradient sky — that sits at the horizon and sweeps as you look around.
  • Spatial audioTwo layers of positional sound: automatic ambient tones for every page, and looping audio clips you anchor anywhere in the scene.

Importing & Assets

Bring the world in: turn a real website into a 3D scene, manage your media, and import 3D models.

  • Import a real websitePoint at a URL and 3dCMS crawls it — pulling pages, images, copy, and links into rearrangeable 3D panels. A fast starting point; how much comes through depends on the site.
  • The Asset LibraryYour account-wide media library for images, 3D models, audio, and HDRIs — upload once, use across every site.
  • Importing 3D modelsBring in GLB, glTF, and OBJ models — with Draco and meshopt compression supported out of the box.

The AI Assistant

An in-editor chat where you describe what you want and Claude builds it — recoloring, arranging, and generating right in your scene.

  • Meet the AssistantA built-in chat panel where Claude makes real edits to your scene. Bring your own Anthropic key — it stays in your browser.
  • What you can ask itFrom "make a hexagon" to "build a 42-cube pyramid" — what the Assistant can do, and the example prompts that show its range.
  • Models, vision & costChoose the Claude model that fits the job, decide whether the Assistant can see your viewport, and understand what each turn costs.
  • How it stays safeAll-or-nothing edits, automatic retries, and guardrails that mean the Assistant can never half-break your scene.

AI Generation

Let the Assistant create assets that don't exist yet — 3D models and PBR materials from a text prompt. Paid, opt-in, off by default.

  • Turning on AI generationGeneration creates brand-new models and materials from text — and spends real money on your own fal.ai key. Here is how to enable it safely.
  • Generating 3D modelsDescribe an object and get a textured 3D model placed in your scene — choose a detail tier to match how you will use it.
  • Generating materialsDescribe a surface and get a seamless, tileable PBR material wired up and assigned — color, normal, roughness, metalness, and height.
  • Costs & safeguardsExactly how generation spends money, the per-day cap, and the reserve-and-refund logic that protects you from surprise bills.

Drive from Claude (MCP)

Build and edit your saved scenes from Claude Desktop or Claude Code, on your own Claude subscription.

  • Drive 3dCMS from ClaudeThe MCP server lets Claude — in Desktop, Code, or the terminal — build and edit your saved scenes using your existing Claude subscription.
  • Generate your API tokenA per-account token is what lets Claude reach your scenes. Generate it on the Account page — it is shown only once.
  • Connect Claude Desktop & CodePoint Claude at the bundled MCP server with your token. Copy-paste configs for both Claude Code and Claude Desktop.
  • Tools & quick phrasesWhat the MCP server lets Claude do — list, read, create, edit, and publish your scenes — and the phrases that trigger each tool.

Publishing & Hosting

Save your work, publish a public 3D site, and host several named sites from one account.

  • Saving your workThree kinds of save — autosave, named local versions, and cloud source scenes — and when to reach for each.
  • Publishing to the webTurn your scene into a public, crawlable page with a shareable link — and understand exactly what gets built.
  • Multi-site hostingOne account, many named sites — each with its own memorable URL, managed from the Settings panel.
  • Starter templatesFive neighborhood layouts that seed a new site with pages arranged in a useful 3D shape.
  • Explore & your creator profilePublished sites are discoverable on a public gallery and on your own creator profile — and you can opt any site out.
  • Views & analyticsA privacy-light view counter and analytics panel — timeline, devices, referrers, and per-page breakdown — visible to you alone.
  • Download your site (static export)Export a published site as a self-contained zip that runs on any static web host — plus the older scene.json / GLB export path.

SEO & AI-Readability

Every 3D page ships a clean, semantic HTML mirror — so search engines and AI crawlers read the same content your visitors see.

  • How the semantic mirror worksA 3D scene is invisible to crawlers — so 3dCMS renders a full, readable HTML mirror of every page at the same URL. No cloaking.
  • Editing page SEOWhere to set a page's title, description, slug, hero copy, and more — and which richer fields are populated by import or AI rather than by hand.
  • Sitemaps, llms.txt & Search ConsoleThe discovery files 3dCMS generates so search engines and AI crawlers can find and read every page.

The Consumer View

What your visitors actually experience: a fullscreen, touch-friendly, navigable 3D site with a tour and search built in.

  • Exploring a published sceneThe visitor's-eye view — how people move through your 3D site on desktop and mobile, and the controls they get for free.
  • The page tourOne button auto-walks visitors through every page of a multi-page scene — and steps aside the instant they take control.
  • The search paletteVisitors can jump to any page with a keyboard command palette — the same ⌘K muscle memory they already have.
  • Visitor reactionsA friction-free ❤️ 👏 🔥 tally lets visitors react to a published scene — social proof for you, a dopamine tap for them.
  • Fullscreen, audio & accessibilityThe defaults that make a 3dCMS site comfortable for everyone — reduced-motion support, audio control, offline resilience, and robust loading.
  • Reporting a sceneA quiet ⚑ Report affordance lets any visitor flag a published scene for a moderator to review.

Performance

Keep scenes smooth on every device — check the budget before you publish, watch the live meter, and build light.

  • Scene weightOne number for how expensive your scene is, broken down by what is costing you — and the only performance measure that can block a publish.
  • The compatibility checkA pre-publish report that estimates triangles, draw calls, texture memory, and particles — and tells you which devices can handle your scene.
  • The live performance HUDAn opt-in overlay that shows real frames-per-second and renderer stats as you work or as a visitor explores.
  • Building fast scenesThe handful of habits — render quality, LOD, instancing, decimation, texture caps — that keep big scenes running smoothly.

Account & Settings

Sign in, manage your scenes and sites, tune the editor to your taste, and control your data.

  • Signing inA free Google sign-in — or a passwordless email link — unlocks saving to the cloud, publishing, the asset library, and the AI features.
  • Your accountThe Account page is mission control for your profile, handle, saved scenes, published links, API token, and the community feed.
  • The Settings panelA guided tour of every Settings group — lighting, environment, sites, deployment, viewport feel, snapping, touch, and accessibility.
  • Privacy & deleting your accountHow to delete your account and everything in it, and where the privacy and terms pages live.

Reference

The lookup shelf: every keyboard shortcut, a glossary, an FAQ, and an honest list of what isn't built yet.

  • Keyboard shortcutsThe complete key map — scene editing, camera, hierarchy navigation, and the polygon modeling tools. Press ? in the editor for the live list.
  • GlossaryPlain-English definitions for every bit of 3dCMS vocabulary you will meet in this manual.
  • FAQ & troubleshootingQuick answers to the questions and snags that come up most often.
  • Known limits & what's not built yetAn honest list of things people expect to find that don't exist yet — so you never waste time hunting for them.