Publishing to the web
Turn your scene into a public, crawlable page with a shareable link — and understand exactly what gets built.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
Publishing turns your scene into a live, public page anyone can visit — no login required to view it.
How to publish
- Open File ▸ Publish…
A dialog asks for a Published name (it defaults to your scene's name).
- Click Publish
3dCMS builds the page and opens a Share dialog — the link is already copied to your clipboard, and the popup stays put with Copy, Open ↗, and one-click share targets (the native share sheet where the device offers one, plus X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Email). Click Done to dismiss it — it never vanishes out from under you mid-copy.
The Share dialog also shows two extras: a preview of the social card people will see when the link is shared (see below), and a scannable QR code of the link — right-click it to Save image as… and keep the code to print or drop on a flyer.
What else the Share dialog offers
- Show on Explore & your profile — a checkbox that lists (or hides) this site in the public Explore gallery and on your creator profile. It's on by default and reflects the site's real state, so re-publishing a site you'd previously hidden keeps it hidden.
- Views so far — once your published site has any traffic, its view count shows here too.
- First-publish celebration — the very first time you ever publish, the dialog greets you with a one-time celebration and a nudge to share your new link. You'll only ever see it once.
- The scene-weight meter — how expensive your scene is to render, scored and broken down by category. See scene weight.
- Export site (.zip) — download the whole published site as a self-contained bundle you can host anywhere. See download your site.
Your scene goes live at a memorable, handle-based URL:
https://3dcms.info/<your-handle>/sites/<slug>/The slug is derived from the name automatically — you don't hand-pick it.
Where visitors land (spawn pose)
Publishing captures your current editor camera as the pose visitors open the scene at — frame the shot you want, then publish. To lock a spawn that survives future publishes, open Settings ▸ Visitor Spawn, line up the view, and click Set spawn to current view (a pinned spawn overrides both the auto-capture and any Entry camera or page). Clear it there to fall back to capture-at-publish.
The social card (link preview)
The same publish also snaps a thumbnail of your scene from that camera and uses it as the site's social card — the image that appears when the link is pasted into a chat, a post, or a message. It becomes the page's Open Graph and Twitter image (a hero image, if set, is the fallback when no shot is captured). Because it's taken from your publish camera, framing a good spawn shot doubles as framing a good link preview — one more reason to line up the view before you publish.
What publishing builds
Behind that one click, the server generates, at publish time:
- A static HTML page for every page in your scene — fast, cacheable, no runtime needed.
- A plain-text mirror of each page (clean reading for AI crawlers).
- A sitemap, robots.txt, llms.txt, and scene.json for the site.
- An instant search-engine ping (IndexNow) so new and changed pages get noticed quickly.
It's all covered in SEO & AI-readability.
When a publish is refused
One thing can stop a publish: a scene that's far too heavy to render. Over the scene-weight red line you get a warning and the publish goes through anyway; only past the hard cap is it blocked, and then a dialog names the heaviest categories so you can trim them and publish again.
Draft vs published
Preview (and the editor) show your working draft — not public. Publish produces the public copy. They're independent: editing your scene doesn't change the live site until you publish again. Re-publishing overwrites the site and tidily prunes pages you removed or renamed, so no ghost URLs linger.