Quickstart: your first scene
From a blank viewport to a published, shareable 3D page in about five minutes. Eight small steps, no prior 3D experience required.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
Let's build something real and put it on the internet. This whole tour takes about five minutes and uses nothing but the editor's defaults. We'll make a tiny still-life — a couple of objects on the ground — and publish it.
-
Open the editor and sign in
Go to 3dcms.info and click Sign in (top-right). You'll bounce through Google and land back in the editor with a starter scene already loaded. The big area in the middle is your viewport — the live 3D window.
-
Get comfortable moving the camera
Before you touch anything, learn to look around — it's the one thing that trips up newcomers:
- Orbit: hold Alt and drag with the left mouse button.
- Pan: hold Alt and drag with the middle mouse button.
- Zoom: scroll the mouse wheel anytime, or hold Alt and drag with the right mouse button.
On a touch screen, one finger orbits and two fingers pan/pinch. (Why Alt? Because a plain left-drag is reserved for selecting objects.)
-
Add your first object
Open the Create menu in the top bar and pick Box (it's under Primitives). A cube drops into the scene and is automatically selected — you'll see a colored outline around it.
-
Move it around
Press W to grab the Move tool. Three colored arrows (the gizmo) appear on the cube — drag one to slide it along that axis. Press E to rotate and R to scale. Made a mess? Ctrl+Z undoes anything.
-
Give it a material
Open the Windows menu and choose Materials. In the Starter Library, click a preset — say Gold Leaf or Ocean Glass. It applies to your selected cube instantly. That's the whole materials story for now; there's a full node graph waiting when you want it.
-
Add a friend and arrange
From Create, add a Sphere. Move it next to the cube. Want a copy of something? Select it and press D to duplicate. Press F at any time to frame (re-center the camera on) your selection. Your scene is already lit — 3dCMS gives every scene a real sun and sky automatically.
-
Preview it like a visitor
Open File ▸ Preview. This drops you into the consumer view — the same fullscreen, touch-friendly experience your visitors get. Orbit around, then click Open the editor to come back.
-
Publish to the web
Open File ▸ Publish…, give it a name (like "My First Scene"), and click Publish. 3dCMS builds the page and copies a shareable link to your clipboard. Paste it anywhere — it's a real, public URL that works for anyone, no login required. 🎉
What just happened
You created scene nodes, transformed them, assigned a material, previewed the consumer view, and published a static, crawlable page. That's the entire core loop of 3dCMS in miniature. Everything else in this manual is depth on top of those moves.