Publishing & Hosting

Saving your work

Three kinds of save (autosave, Save to your account, and Save As), and when to reach for each.

The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.

3dCMS has three ways to keep your work, and knowing the difference saves headaches. (See Core concepts for the short version.)

Autosave: always on

Every edit is silently written to your browser, and a refresh restores it. A "Saved Xs ago" pill near the menu bar shows recency. Autosave is tied to this browser, though, and the browser's storage tops out around 5 MB, so a scene with a heavy imported or generated model can outgrow it. When that happens, 3dCMS tells you to use Save As.

A crash can't lock you out Because the editor auto-restores your last scene on every visit, a scene heavy enough to crash the tab on load could otherwise leave you stuck. If 3dCMS detects that the previous load never finished, it parks that scene and offers a choice: Load my scene (try it once more) or Start without it (open fresh: your parked scene is moved safely into your saved list, never discarded, even when it was too big for normal autosave). So the editor always opens, even after a bad scene. If you later reopen that parked scene from your saved list, 3dCMS reminds you it's the one that failed to load before, and suggests a more powerful device or an immediate Save As to move it to your account.

Save As: a copy on your account

File ▸ Save As… stores your scene as an editable source scene on your account (up to 50 MB a scene, which is far past what the browser's local slot holds). Open it from any device via your Account page. Like Save As anywhere else, it always creates a new scene: the one you had open is left exactly as it was, published link and all. To update the open scene instead, use plain Save; to change its name without forking, use File ▸ Rename…. This is the durable home for anything you care about.

There's a ceiling on saved scenes per account: 200 on the free plan, and 300, 600 and 1,200 on Starter, Developer and Worldbuilder (always at least the plan's published-site count, with room for drafts). It is there so a runaway script can't fill the disk. Hit it and 3dCMS says so plainly, naming the plan and the way up, instead of failing the save mysteriously. The same cap covers scenes created through the MCP tools.

Renaming won't move a published link A scene's public URL is minted the first time you publish it and then stays put, so links you've already shared never break. Rename the scene all you like: republishing still updates the same address. If you truly want a different URL, use Change address on the site's row in your Account page's Published tab: the old address keeps working and forwards visitors to the new one.

Save: the scene on your account

Save (Ctrl+S) updates the scene you have open on your account, in place and with no prompt. The first Save of a brand-new scene asks for a name, because there is nothing on the account to update yet: that first Save is Save As. Every Save also leaves a checkpoint of the copy it replaced on the server, so File ▸ Version history… can roll it back; for a separate scene you can keep under its own name, use File ▸ Save As…. It sits on the menu bar next to Publish, with a dot on it whenever you have unsaved changes, as well as in the File menu. That unsaved mark is remembered with the autosave, so a reload (or a browser that restarted overnight) brings it back along with your edits: the guards that ask before replacing unsaved work stay armed, and the menu never reads "no changes" over a week of them.

If the account scene you are saving to has been deleted in the meantime (from the Account page on another device, say), Save says so, unlinks the open scene from it and opens Save As so the work lands somewhere, rather than failing the same way on every press.

Anything that replaces your scene asks first Open… (from your account or from your device), New scene, Reset scene, and starting from a template all swap out what you have open and clear undo history. Each of them confirms first when there's unsaved work, so a mis-click can't quietly take a scene out of both undo and recovery at once. "Unsaved work" now includes work you did entirely with the mouse (a gizmo move, a vertex drag, a drag-extrude), which the guards used to wave straight through because nothing had been typed.

Two tabs, same scene? If you open the same scene in two tabs, 3dCMS won't let them silently clobber each other: it pauses background autosave and shows a Reload / Keep banner so you choose which version wins. Reload latest adopts the other tab's copy and the account scene it belongs to, so the next Ctrl+S writes to the right place; Keep this tab keeps yours. Opening a scene from the Account page while it is already open in the editor with unsaved edits asks first, too.

When the account copy changed under you

Every save carries the revision of the scene it was opened from, and the server refuses to write over a newer one. If something else saved this scene since you opened it (another device or tab, the Assistant over MCP, a Version history restore), your save is not applied and a banner says This scene was saved somewhere else since you opened it, with the time it changed. Nothing is lost yet, and the banner offers the three ways out: Reload account copy opens the newer copy and keeps the edits made here as a recovered copy (File ▸ Open from this device), Save as copy opens Save As so both versions survive as separate scenes, and Save over it keeps this version instead. A Ctrl+S with nothing edited locally has nothing to weigh, so it simply opens the newer copy and tells you. Publish makes the same check, because a publish saves the account copy too.

Version history

File ▸ Version history… is in the menu for every scene you own. It lists the checkpoints the server has taken of that scene, newest first, with a Restore button on each. Every save checkpoints the copy it replaces, on any scene you own: a Ctrl+S in the editor, a save made by Publish, a template master being updated. Saves inside the same couple of minutes record one checkpoint between them and a save that changes nothing records none, so a long editing session leaves a handful of sensible steps rather than one per keystroke. Every apply_ops call over MCP checkpoints the scene it is about to change first, unthrottled, because there is no undo over MCP: the dialog is how you roll one back. Restoring checkpoints your current scene first, so stepping back is itself undoable: reopen the dialog to step forward again. The newest 30 are kept, within a size budget per scene.

What gets checkpointed is the server's last saved copy: that's all the server holds. So if you have unsaved edits open when you restore, the confirmation says so and offers Save changes, then restore beside Discard changes and restore: the save finishes first, then the restore lands, so the checkpoint is the work you actually did rather than a stale copy of it.

A checkpoint is a step back, not a second scene. For a copy you can name, keep and open side by side with the original, reach for Save As….

The editor checks for a newer copy on its own

You no longer learn that the account copy moved only when a save bounces. The editor asks the account once after it opens a scene and again whenever the tab comes back into view (at most once a minute). If a newer revision is there and you have no unsaved edits, it loads that copy and tells you; if you do have edits, the same banner described above appears right away, before more work piles onto the stale version.

The Object Library

Separately, you can save individual objects (not whole scenes) to a per-browser Object Library and drop them into any scene later, handy for a logo, a signature prop, a reusable arrangement.

‹ PreviousDesign help: briefs, framing and reviews Next ›Publishing to the web

Spotted something off, or want a topic covered? Tell us, a person reads every message.