3dCMS Knowledge Base
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Importing & Assets

Import a real website

Point 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.

Open in the interactive manual →

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


This is the feature that turns "build a 3D site" into "point at a URL." Web import crawls a real website and lays its pages out as navigable 3D page surfaces — copy, images, links, and theme included. Find it under File ▸ Import Real Website.

Think of it as an asset harvester Import is the fastest way to get your real content into a scene — your words, your images, your link structure — so you can rearrange it in 3D instead of starting from a blank page.

Running an import

  1. Enter a URL

    Type any address in Website URL (3dCMS adds https:// if you skip it).

  2. Choose how deep to crawl

    Crawl depth (1–5) sets how many link-levels to follow. Depth 1 is a single page; higher follows the navigation outward. Max pages caps the total.

  3. Pick a 3D layout

    Hub & Spoke puts the home page at the center with others orbiting it; By Nav Section clusters pages by the site's top-level sections.

  4. (Optional) tune the advanced options

    Panel aspect and width, spacing, how much HTML to keep per page, max images per panel, and more.

  5. Import

    Click Import Website. A progress bar counts "Crawling… X / Y pages," then "Import complete!" The first page is selected and framed for you.

What gets harvested

For each page, 3dCMS pulls out:

  • Copy — title, hero text, summary, meta description, content sections, FAQ, testimonials, reading time, and organization info.
  • Images — the hero plus a gallery (capped by your max-images setting).
  • The link graph — nav and links, with cross-page links rewired to the imported pages so navigation works in 3D.
  • Theme — accent and background colors lifted from the page.

The crawl stays same-origin, skips non-content paths (login, cart, search, admin), and de-duplicates tracking-tagged URLs. Re-importing a site cleanly replaces its existing page surfaces (it asks first).

A few honest limits
  • Extraction quality varies a lot by site — clean marketing/portfolio pages harvest best; dense, app-like, or heavily-scripted sites yield much less, and brand colors or long text can come through rough.
  • Imported images stream from the original site — they're not copied into your Asset Library.
  • Pages come in as panels, not loose per-element objects.
  • Images that the source site loads lazily via JavaScript may not be captured (the crawl reads the server's HTML).
  • On the hosted app you'll need to be signed in — the crawl runs through an authenticated proxy.
Spotted something off, or want a topic covered? Email buck.rackley@gmail.com.