The Studio manual

Mixos Studio is a 3D scene application that runs in a browser tab. You build or import objects, arrange and light them, animate them and render the result. You sign in to use it, and there is nothing to install.

The chapters follow the order questions usually arrive in: the workspace and viewport, your scene's structure, building, materials and lighting, animation and rendering, then building by asking and the keyboard. Each section starts with what you can do there and where the control is.

None of this layout is fixed. Panels can be closed, moved or floated, the viewport can split into up to four panes, and any arrangement can be saved as a section of your own — see Panels and layout.

1. 1
   Put something in the scene — Use the create rail on the left: Mesh for a primitive, Import for your own file. Or start from a finished scene — the welcome card offers a few, and File ▸ New from template… opens the whole gallery. A new object is selected straight away.
2. 2
   Move it — Drag the gizmo handles in the viewport, or type into Position, Rotation and Scale in the inspector. Both edit the same values.
3. 3
   Give it a surface — Click Library on the materials bar along the bottom. With the object selected, click one of the ready-made CC0 surfaces; it lands on the object and in the bar.
4. 4
   Light it — Open Light on the create rail and add an Environment and a Sun, or the Three-point rig. Until you do, the viewport lends the scene a neutral studio light so you can see.
5. 5
   Save it — Press ⌘S. The scene goes to the Scenes library in your account, so it is on your other devices too. The chip beside the scene's name turns Saved when it has arrived.

You decide where panels live. The outliner, inspector, library, material editor and History panel can each move to the other column, and all of them except the inspector can float over the viewport. Closed panels come back from the Window menu, which puts a check beside each open one.

1. 1
   Move a panel — Right-click its header and pick where it should go — the other column, or a floating window. A floating window's title bar has a button that docks it again.
2. 2
   Resize a region — Drag the divider between any two regions.
3. 3
   Split the viewport — Open View in the viewport header and pick a pane layout: one pane, two side by side, two stacked, or four. Choose each pane's viewpoint from the label in its corner.
4. 4
   Keep the arrangement — Choose Window ▸ Save workspace…. It becomes a section of your own in the section list.

Each pane of a split viewport has its own viewpoint: perspective, a camera, or a flat top, front, side or back view. The gizmo and editing tools stay in one working pane; the pointer button on another pane makes that one the working pane. Four panes showing top, front, right and perspective is the classic modelling layout.

Each section opens at its own sizes, and switching sections lays it out that way again. So a panel you moved or a column you dragged lasts until you switch, unless you save the arrangement.

The top bar has three zones that never trade places: what you are working on at the left, the current section in the centre, and document-wide actions at the right.

• Left — the Mixos mark, which takes you home, the app name and the scene's name. Click the name to rename the scene. The save chip sits beside it.
• Centre — the ☰ menus, the section pill, and the section's own pages: Generate in Standard, Procedural and UV in Modeling, Rigging in Animation. A page opens in the left column; click the lit one to close it again.
• Right — Assets, the ⌘K search glyph, your avatar, undo and redo, then Send to, Render and Export. Render becomes Stop while a render runs. On a narrower window Send to is hidden; use File ▸ Send object to instead.

The avatar's menu holds My projects, Help & keyboard shortcuts, Send feedback… and Sign out, plus team, class and upgrade rows when they apply to your account.

The save chip appears once there is something to save, and clicking it saves. It shows one of five states:

Unsaved

Amber. There are changes the saved scene does not have yet.

Saving…

A save is in progress.

Backing up

Saved in this browser and on its way to your account.

This device

Saved in this browser, but the backup to your account has not landed — for example because you are offline or your storage is full. Press ⌘S or click the chip to try again.

Saved

Green. The scene is in your Scenes library.

A section rearranges the whole window for one kind of work — the panels, the left column and the tools all change with it. Switch sections from the pill in the centre of the top bar. The pill always shows the section you are in, in its own colour.

There are seven: Standard, Modeling, Sculpt, Animation, Simulation, Rendering and Generate image & video.

Standard

The general-purpose layout, and the one to stay in until you need another: create rail, outliner and inspector, materials bar. Its page is Generate, which makes models and materials from a prompt.

Modeling

For shaping geometry. The viewport switches to Clay on the way in and back to Materials on the way out. Its pages are Procedural, a node network beside the model, and UV, the texture atlas beside the model.

Sculpt

Brush the selected object in place with ten brushes. See Sculpting in Studio.

Animation

Opens the timeline under the viewport. Its Rigging page covers skeletons, skin weights, IK and the motion library.

Simulation

Things that move on their own — falling and breaking objects, cloth, hair, particles, smoke, fire and liquid — with the timeline open. See Simulation.

Rendering

The viewport becomes the render and the left column its settings. See Rendering.

Generate image & video

Makes a still or a short video from the scene as the viewport frames it. See Generate image & video.

Window ▸ Save workspace… keeps the arrangement on screen as a section of your own, and it joins the same list. Window ▸ Reset this workspace puts the current section back the way it ships. Studio reopens in the section you were last in.

The menus list everything Studio can do, including every control on the rails, the context bar and the panels. Open them from the ☰ button in the centre of the top bar.

There are ten: File, Edit, Create, Select, Mesh, Curve, Modify, Animate, Render and Window. Under them sit Find a command… (⌘K) and Mouse & keyboard…, the list of every key in the keymap you use.

Window is the one to learn first. It opens and closes each panel — outliner, inspector, library, material editor, materials bar, timeline, graph editor, History — and the pages Render settings, Generate image & video and Scene statistics. It also holds the workspace commands, Preferences… and this manual.

1. 1
   Press ⌘K — The command palette opens, with the commands you ran last at the top.
2. 2
   Type what you want — It matches by meaning as well as by name, and each row shows where the command lives in the menus.
3. 3
   Press Enter — The command runs. If it needs values, a short form asks for them first; Enter runs it. Destructive commands say so before you press Enter.

Open Window ▸ Preferences… or press ⌘,. There are five groups: General, Units, Keyboard, Navigation and Viewport. Only the units are saved with the scene; everything else is about you, not the file.

• General — Autosave keeps a background copy of the scene in this browser, so a crash or reload does not lose it — File ▸ Autosave ▸ Recover autosaved scene brings it back; the line under it says when the last copy was taken. Procedural vNext beta shows the newer node-network tools. Local agent evidence is a privacy-filtered log kept in this browser and never uploaded, with a Clear button.
• Units — what a number means. None keeps bare world units; Metric or Imperial gives them a physical size. Metres per unit matters for imports: a model made in centimetres reads correctly once one unit is 0.01 metres, and no geometry moves. Display unit can be pinned or left on Auto.
• Keyboard — whose transform keys the viewport uses: mixos (Maya-style) W/E/R, Blender's G/R/S, or Cinema 4D's E/R/T. See all shortcuts opens the full list.
• Navigation — Orbit around the selection centres each orbit on what is selected. Below it is a reference table of the camera gestures, which all work at once (see Keyboard shortcuts).
• Viewport — the backdrop behind your model: Dark, Mid or Light. This is the room you work in, not the background of a render.

Autosave is not a save. File ▸ Save puts a scene in your library; an autosave exists only in this browser. File ▸ Autosave holds Recover and Discard.

Every number field accepts arithmetic and units: 1m+5cm gives 1.05 metres, and 2*3, sqrt(2) and 2*pi work as expected. A leading *2, /2, +10cm or -5% changes the value already there; a plain -5 is just minus five.

The viewport header, across the top right of the viewport, sets how the scene is drawn. Its shading strip, overlays eye, Display menu and View menu never change your document.

Wire

Edges only — no materials, no lighting.

Clay

One clay colour on everything under a fixed studio light, so you read only the form.

Materials

Your materials under the scene's own lamps and world.

The eye beside the strip hides or shows every overlay at once — grid, gizmos, handles and the selection outline. It lights up while overlays are off.

Display has six groups:

• Backdrop — the shade behind your model: Dark, Mid or Light.
• Overlay — the ground grid, wireframe over the shaded surface, gizmos, an on-screen statistics readout, bounding boxes and motion paths.
• Preview lighting — the two swaps described above.
• Resolution — Auto, Full, Reduced or Low. Auto matches your display and steps down by itself if this machine struggles.
• Shadows — Off, Low, Medium or High, by how many lamps may cast one.
• Effort — Refine while still keeps cleaning edges and shadows while nothing moves; Bounced light; Occlusion, the contact shadow in creases, which also works in Clay; Reflections of nearby objects; Simplify distant meshes; and Refract glass. Bounced light, reflections and refraction apply in Materials only, and their rows say so.

View holds the rest:

• The camera — Free view or any camera in the scene. Looking through a camera makes orbiting move that camera. You can also make a new camera from the current view, or one framing the selection.
• Walk — a first-person fly-through. Its keys are listed in Preferences ▸ Navigation.
• Passes — replaces the picture with one diagnostic buffer, such as depth, normals, a single material channel or an identity colour. The header says which is showing.
• Frame — masks the viewport to a delivery aspect such as 16:9 or 9:16, or to a camera's frame, with optional guides like the rule of thirds. Off removes it.
• Layout — one pane, two side by side, two stacked, or four, each with its own viewpoint.

Mixos AI is the creative agent for Studio. Describe a scene or product shot, follow its work, then open the result in the same editable Studio workspace. Meet Mixos AI explains the workflow and current availability.

Generate material or model in the viewport header remains a separate Studio tool: it opens a prompt box for a surface or 3D model and uses Mixos AI credits.

The axis marker in the bottom-right corner of the viewport shows which way the scene faces. Click one of its balls to look from that side, or the centre dot for a three-quarter isometric view. It is the quick way back to a square view after you have orbited somewhere confusing.

X is red, Y is green and Z is blue. The same colours mark the transform gizmo's handles, the inspector's Position, Rotation and Scale fields, and the timeline's axis tracks.

The context bar floats over the bottom of the viewport and shows only the controls that apply to your current selection. It is the quickest way to see what an object can do. With nothing selected it offers Select all; in an empty scene, Import model….

• Move, Rotate and Scale — glyphs only; the tooltip gives each one's key in your keymap.
• Axis — moves the object's pivot, the point it rotates and scales around, instead of the object.
• Orientation — which axes the handles follow: World, Object (its own rotated axes), Normal (the selected surface, in edit mode) or View (the screen).
• What the object offers — Make editable on a primitive or other generator; Points, Edges and Polygons on an editable mesh; Edit points on a curve; Edit nodes on a procedural object; Look through on a camera. A locked object shows Locked — unlock instead.

Select several objects and the verbs become Group, Duplicate and Delete. With Rotate or Scale active you can also choose Shared centre or Each own centre. More appear as the count grows:

• Align (two or more) — nine ways to line objects up: left, centre or right on X; bottom, centre or top on Y; back, centre or front on Z.
• Place on (exactly two) — rests the first-selected object against the last: on top, underneath, against a side, or on its surface, turned to face out.
• Distribute (three or more) — spaces them evenly.

Nothing in this bar is ever greyed out — if a control does not apply, it is not shown. If a large selection overruns the bar, arrows appear at its ends to scroll. Rendering and Generate image & video hide the bar.

Open a mesh for editing and the bar switches to the edit set, with Done first.

• Points, Edges and Polygons — decide what a click selects. Picking one also opens the mesh for editing.
• The handle orientation and a count of what is picked.
• Select all and Select none; See-through, so a drag reaches elements on the far side; Lasso, for a freehand loop; Borders, to pick the edges of a hole.
• Once something is picked: Linked grows it to the whole connected piece, Invert swaps it, and in Edges mode Ring takes the parallel band across the quads.

Snapping makes a drag land exactly on something instead of nearly on it. It starts off. The Snap chip in the context bar turns it on and shows the current target; the arrow beside it opens the settings.

Grid

Steps by a fixed distance in world units. The one to leave on for laying things out.

Vertex

Lands exactly on another object's corner.

Edge midpoint

The middle of an edge.

Face centre

The centre of a face.

Object origin

Another object's pivot — how you stack things modelled around their own centres.

• Grid step (Grid only) — the distance objects step by, in world units.
• Radius (the other four targets) — how close the pointer must come to be captured, in screen pixels, so it looks the same at any zoom.
• Angle step — in degrees, for every rotate drag.
• Snap selection to grid now — puts what is selected onto the grid in one click.

1. 1
   Turn snapping on — Click the Snap chip in the context bar.
2. 2
   Pick a target — Open the arrow beside the chip and choose Grid, then set Grid step.
3. 3
   Drag — The object moves in whole grid steps. To line up objects already placed, select them and choose Snap selection to grid now.

The outliner, in the right column, lists everything in the scene as a hierarchy — objects, cameras, lights and the world. Use it to select, rename, group, reorder and parent. Selecting a row selects the object, and the other way round.

The World group at the top holds the Sun, the Environment and Fog once the scene has them. Click one to see its settings in the inspector; its ✕ removes it but remembers its settings for when you add it back.

A new scene has no lighting of its own. Until you add a lamp, Sun or Environment, the World group says Studio light is on: the viewport lends a neutral light so you can see.

1. 1
   Parent an object — Drag its row onto another row. The dragged object now moves with the one you dropped it on.
2. 2
   Unparent it — Drag the row out again.
3. 3
   Group several — Select them and press ⌘G. The group is a parent you can move as a unit.

Each row has visibility, render and lock toggles, and a delete button on hover. Visibility hides the object in the viewport; the camera toggle decides whether it appears in renders. Lock stops an object being moved or edited — lock the floor and you stop dragging it by accident.

Right-click a row to rename, duplicate or instance, group, edit, move to a layer, frame, isolate, hide, lock or delete that object. Right-click the empty space below the rows to add a primitive, select or deselect everything, or expand and collapse the tree.

The footer counts the objects and the selection. When anything is hidden or locked it counts those too — click a count to list only those objects.

A layer is a named, coloured bucket for objects, separate from the hierarchy — like Cinema 4D's layers or Blender's collections. The layer strip sits above the outliner's tree once the scene has a layer or something is selected.

1. 1
   Make a layer — Select objects and click + Layer, or right-click one ▸ New layer from selection.
2. 2
   File more objects on it — Right-click an object ▸ Move to layer.
3. 3
   Narrow the tree — Click the layer's chip to list only its objects. Click it again to show everything.

The ⋯ on a chip holds:

• Hide — takes the layer's objects out of the viewport and out of the marquee.
• Lock — stops them being moved or edited. Every refusal names the layer holding them.
• Solo — shows only that layer while it is on.
• Select its objects, the layer's colour, and delete.

Each row in the tree shows its layer's colour as a thin bar at the left edge, and Select ▸ Select all in layer picks everything on the active chip. Layers are saved with the scene. Pasting an object into another scene keeps its layer only if that scene has one with the same name.

The toolbar above the outliner helps you find and tidy objects once the list is longer than the screen.

• Search — lists only objects whose name matches, with a count of how many are showing. The ✕ clears the search and every filter.
• Type filters — narrow the list to meshes, lights, cameras, groups, splats or characters.
• Isolate selection — hides everything else in the viewport until you press it again, then restores every object's visibility exactly.
• Reveal selection — unfolds the group hiding the selected object and scrolls to it.
• Tidy — appears when loose objects sit at the top of the tree. It files them into Meshes, Lights and Cameras folders, moves nothing in the scene, and undoes in one step.
• ⋯ — Expand all and Collapse all; the sort order (Scene order, the only one you can drag rows in, Name or Type); row density; Select all by type; and, when there are any, filters for hidden or locked objects.

The inspector, in the right column, shows everything about the current selection in tabs. Its header names the selection and its kind; click the name to rename it.

A tab appears only when the object has that thing, so the tab row tells you what the object is:

Object

Visibility in the viewport and in renders, position, rotation and scale, the pivot, and a lamp's light settings.

Shape

A generator's own parameters, such as a parametric cube's width and height.

Mesh

Appears while the mesh is open for editing.

Material, Modifiers, UV

On every mesh.

Lens, Text, Procedural

On a camera, a text object and a procedural object.

Others

Curves, booleans, subdivision surfaces, cloners, effectors, characters and splats each bring their own tab.

The + at the end of the tab row attaches what is not there yet: Motion, which moves an object by a behaviour instead of by keys, and constraints such as aiming at a target, following a path, copying another object's transform or limiting a channel.

The transform fields and the viewport gizmo show the same values. Drag the gizmo to explore; type a number to be exact — every numeric field accepts typing.

The small diamond at the start of a row is its keyframe control. It shows whether the property is animated, and clicking it sets a key at the current frame. Any numeric property can be keyed this way.

A UV map tells a texture where to land: every point on the mesh gets a coordinate on a flat square. Without one, a texture has nowhere to go and the object can come out black.

In Modeling, UV beside the section pill opens the UV page in the left column and puts the atlas beside the model. In other sections, a mesh's inspector has a UV tab with the same page.

1. 1
   Select the mesh — Open the UV page or the inspector's UV tab.
2. 2
   Press Auto UV — It unfolds the whole object and packs it into the square. For most objects you are done.
3. 3
   Refine if you need to — Open UV editor for control. Its Auto UV keeps a projection choice: Smart is right unless the shape says otherwise; Box, Flat, Tube and Ball suit shapes like those.
4. 4
   Check it — Read the Checks counts. Click any non-zero count to select the islands at fault.

Seams

Where the surface is cut so it can lie flat — like the edges you would slice on a paper model. Auto proposes cuts along folds, From edges cuts the edges you picked in edit mode, Clear removes every cut.

Solve

Unfolds the pieces. Balanced keeps area even; Conformal keeps angles and is safer on organic shapes.

Layout

Pack lays the islands into the square with a gap between them, Straighten squares them to the axes, Stack dupes puts identical shapes on one patch of texture, and Even density gives every part the same texture resolution.

Checks counts defects you cannot see until a texture goes wrong:

• Flipped — the island paints mirrored.
• Overlap — two islands share space and bake over each other.
• Dupes — islands with an identical twin, worth stacking.
• Zero-area — collapsed islands that paint as one smeared pixel.

Above the checks, the readout gives the island count, how much of the square is used and how uneven the texture density is. It warns when an island sits outside the square, where it bakes empty.

The Stats page measures what the scene costs to draw — triangles, draw calls, GPU memory, and the work each edit costs — against what this device can handle. Open it from Stats in the outliner's header, or from Window ▸ Scene statistics. The same button, in the page's own header, gives the column back.

Each measure is a bar with its figure and the share of this device's budget it uses, and the header names the device tier. A scene that is comfortable on a desktop can be too heavy for a phone.

Likely mistakes are listed first: everything hidden, a dark lamp, an object scaled to nothing on one axis, or a mesh with holes or loose points. Each names its objects as buttons that select and frame them, with a fix button where there is one. An amber dot on the Stats button means there is something to see.

1. 1
   See what is over — Open Stats. Measures over budget are called out.
2. 2
   Find the weight — Start with the Heaviest list — one imported model is usually most of it. Click a row to select and frame the object.
3. 3
   Hide what you are not working on — Hidden objects cost nothing to draw.
4. 4
   Reuse instead of copying — The Drawn line compares what is drawn with what the document holds, and says how many draw calls instancing shared shapes would save.
5. 5
   Reduce the heavy object — Mesh ▸ Reduce polygons… thins its geometry.

The History panel shows what just happened to your scene. Open it from Window ▸ History. It has two folds, each with a count: Undo history and Command log.

Undo history lists steps newest first, with a dot at the current state. Click a step to roll back or forward to it — exactly what pressing undo or redo that many times would do. A step that bundles several changes shows ×2, ×3 and so on.

Each step carries a badge for the part of the app that owns it: the scene graph, modelling, animation, sculpting or painting. Changes from Mixos AI land here too, one command at a time.

Command log lists the last forty operations and their results. Each line names the operation, who ran it (you, or key for a shortcut), how long ago, and what happened. Refused operations stay in the log with the reason.

The clipboard button beside Command log copies the log as a script you can paste into Window ▸ Scripts… to run again. The script names the objects that existed when you ran it, so edit those references before replaying it on another scene.

Drop a model file anywhere on the Studio window, click Import at the foot of the create rail, or choose File ▸ Import model…. You can drop several files at once, and there is no upload wait — the file is read in the browser.

The rail shows modelling tools instead of Import while an editable mesh is selected; File ▸ Import model… always works.

GLB

The one to prefer: a single file carrying geometry, materials and textures.

glTF

The same format as several files. Drop them together so the textures come too.

FBX

Carries rigs and animation, which is why characters often arrive as FBX. Often large.

OBJ

Keeps its materials when you drop its .mtl and texture files in the same drag; geometry only without them.

STL, 3MF

From 3D printing. No materials or UVs.

PLY, DAE

Read as well. A PLY holding a Gaussian splat or point cloud arrives as a splat object.

SPZ, SPLAT, KSPLAT

Gaussian splat captures. Each arrives as one splat object, drawn in the viewport. A GLB or glTF that carries splats (KHR_gaussian_splatting) arrives the same way.

SVG, AI, PDF

Arrive as an extruded logo: editable curves inside an Extrude generator. An SVG with several fill colours becomes a stack of layers, each with its own material. Text and strokes are not read — convert them to outlines first.

File ▸ Supported import formats… lists them all.

A model arrives as a hierarchy: each part becomes a named row in the outliner with its own transform and material. A rigged character keeps its skeleton and skin weights, and any animation in the file comes with it.

In the Mixos iPhone app, a model you open from Files, AirDrop or Mail lands here the same way. So does a scan from the app's scanner, at the real-world size it was measured at.

The create rail, down the left edge, adds objects to the scene. A new object is selected straight away, so the inspector already shows its parameters.

Mesh

The primitives.

Curve

Paths — circle, rectangle, arc, star, line — and Draw, the pen for drawing your own.

Light

Three groups: Light the scene (Environment or Sun), Lamps (Point, Directional, Spot, Area, IES) and Rig (Three-point, Studio softbox, Dramatic rim). See Lighting.

Generator

Builds geometry from what you put under it: Subdivision for meshes; Extrude, Lathe, Sweep and Loft for curves; and Starter networks… for procedural objects.

Cloner

Repetition, a few ready-made setups, and the effectors that vary it. See Cloners and effectors.

Text, Camera, Null

Created on the click.

Import

Brings in your own file.

The rail keeps the same buttons whatever you select, with one exception: select one editable mesh and the modelling tools replace it. Select anything else — a primitive, text, a light, several objects or nothing — and the create rail returns.

The Create menu has most of the same things plus a few the rail does not: 3D text, 3D logo…, an Ambient light, a Boolean container, Procedural…, a Sweep list of ready-made shapes, more curve shapes, and MoGraph ▸ Make cloner editable. The Environment and Sun, IES lamps, lighting rigs and cloner setups are on the rail only.

Select one editable mesh and the create rail becomes the modelling rail. Its tools change depending on whether you are picking points, edges or polygons.

On a computer the rail opens showing only Shape. More tools at its foot unfolds Topology, Remove and Mesh, and Less folds them away. On a phone the Tools sheet shows all four groups.

Shape

Changes form without changing how the mesh is built. Polygons: Extrude, Inset (a border inside a face), Bevel (a recessed or raised panel), Poke (fans a face from its centre), Panelize (a grid of recessed panels), Flatten. Points: Smooth, Bevel (cuts a corner into a facet), Push (along the normals), Flatten. Edges: Extrude (a border edge into new faces), Flatten, Bevel (rounds edges), Slide.

Topology

Changes how the mesh is built: Loop cut, Knife (cut along a line you drag), Divide (into a grid), Bridge (joins two faces or two open borders), Connect (an edge between two points). On edges: Spin, Sharp (holds edges hard) and Offset. In every mode: Mirror, Recalc (makes every face agree which way is out) and Clean up (deletes loose geometry and welds overlapping points).

Remove

Delete face (leaves the hole), Dissolve (removes edges or points and merges what was either side) and Merge (welds the selection into one point).

Mesh

Needs no selection, so it is never greyed: Fill holes, To tris, To quads, Flip, and Subdiv (the selected faces, or the whole mesh when nothing is selected).

1. 1
   Pick faces — With the mesh selected, choose Polygons in the context bar and click a face.
2. 2
   Arm the tool — Click Extrude on the rail. The operator panel opens and the viewport previews the result.
3. 3
   Dial it in — Drag Distance and the other sliders until it looks right.
4. 4
   Accept — Press Accept (⏎), or Cancel (Esc) to leave the mesh untouched.

A tool that needs a selection you have not made is greyed, and hovering it says what it wants — for example “Select exactly two faces”.

The Mesh menu has every rail tool plus the ones the rail has no room for:

• Detail preset — ready-made hard-surface details, such as a panel inset, a raised boss or a stepped vent, cut into the selected face.
• Separate by selection, loose parts or material; Join objects; Rip faces free.
• Reduce polygons… — Half, A quarter or A tenth of the triangles, keeping the shape.
• Make game ready… — a light copy of a scan or other heavy textured object, for Mobile / web (10k triangles, 2K maps), PC / console (20k, 4K; not on a phone) or Roblox UGC (4k, 1K). The copy gets fresh UVs with its colour, surface detail and occlusion baked on, and the original is hidden, not replaced.
• Merge by distance…, Bisect, Knife project, Boolean (union, subtract, intersect), Convex hull and Symmetrize.
• Shade smooth, Shade flat, Crease edges (hold them sharp)… and Unwrap UVs.

In edit mode, the Select menu extends what you have picked by following the mesh, so you rarely click elements one at a time.

Grow / Shrink selection

One ring outward or back — the fastest way from one face to a patch.

Invert elements

Swaps picked for unpicked.

Select edge ring

Follows the topology all the way round, as around a cylinder.

Select linked

The whole connected piece — how you isolate one part of an import.

Select open borders

The edges of every hole, so you can see what Fill holes will close.

Checker deselect

Drops every other element, for alternating patterns.

Select similar facing

Everything pointing roughly the same way, such as the whole top of an object.

Select facing

By direction: up, down, left, right, front or back.

Select by trait

Problems: non-manifold or loose geometry, interior faces, sharp edges — or a random half.

Selection gesture, in the same menu, switches a drag between a box and a freehand lasso. The context bar carries the everyday picks while you edit.

The inspector's Mesh tab, while you edit, holds two more. Symmetry mirrors your edits across X, Y or Z. Soft selection makes a pull fade out over a Radius, with a Falloff shape and a Reach that spreads along the surface or straight through space.

A curve is an editable path. It renders nothing on its own: the Generator items on the create rail turn it into geometry by lathing, sweeping, lofting or extruding it, and a Follow path constraint sends an object along it.

1. 1
   Pick up the pen — Choose Draw under the rail's Curve button, or Create ▸ Curve ▸ Draw with pen…. A ghost marker shows where the next point will land, and a dashed band shows the segment it will make.
2. 2
   Place points — Click for a sharp corner; press and drag for a smooth point whose tangent follows the drag. Hold Shift to step the angle by 15°, and press Backspace to remove the last point.
3. 3
   Finish — Click the first point to close the outline, or press Esc or ⏎ to stop with the curve open.

While the pen is out, the context bar shows its own strip:

• Drawing — puts the pen down.
• Plane — which world plane points land on, so a drawn outline stays flat and extrudable from any camera angle. Auto — follow the camera picks the plane the view most faces and fixes it once the first point is down.
• Grid — rounds each point to the grid step.
• A readout of where the next point will land, with its distance and angle from the last one.
• Undo point.

To edit a curve, select it and choose Edit points (⇥) in the context bar. The bar then holds:

• Done, to leave.
• Corner, Smooth and Align — a sharp corner, a smooth tangent, or a broken tangent's two handles put back in line.
• Delete, Select all and Select none.
• Close curve or Open curve. An open curve also gets Extend, which continues it past its last point, and Draw, which picks the pen back up.

In the viewport, drag a point to move it and drag a handle to reshape the curve; Alt-drag a handle to break the tangent. Click on the line to add a point there, and double-click a point to switch it between corner and smooth. Drag across empty space to band-select points, Shift to add to them, and nudge them with the arrow keys — one grid step, or ten with Shift.

Whether a curve is closed matters: lathing an open curve gives a surface with an edge, and lathing a closed one gives a solid.

Tools that take an amount — Extrude, Inset, Bevel, Poke, Panelize, Smooth, Push, Slide, Loop cut and Divide — arm instead of firing at once. On a computer, the operator panel opens beside the viewport and previews the result live.

Nothing is written while the panel is open. Accept (⏎) applies the result as one undo step; Cancel (Esc) costs nothing, not even an undo step. Right-click a slider to reset it.

If the numbers cannot build anything — a zero-distance extrude, or a one-by-one Divide or Panelize grid — the panel says so and disables Accept.

On a phone, an armed tool appears as the operator bar: a row at the bottom of the screen that replaces the context bar until you finish. It names the tool and shows its main amount — the distance of an extrude, the width of an inset — as a full-width slider. A button opens the remaining settings and says how many there are.

Accept applies it as one undo step. The ✕ cancels and costs nothing.

A modifier changes how a mesh comes out without editing the mesh itself. Modifiers stack on the inspector's Modifiers tab, run from top to bottom, and can be reordered, switched off or deleted at any time.

1. 1
   Add a stage — Select the object, open the inspector's Modifiers tab and click Add modifier.
2. 2
   Tune it — Change its numbers; the viewport updates as you drag.
3. 3
   Order it — Drag a stage by its grip. The eye switches it off without losing its settings, and two more toggles skip it in the viewport or in renders.

Generate

Rebuild the geometry. Subdivide, Bevel, Array, Radial, Mirror, Solidify and Boolean add to it; Decimate, Weld and Triangulate thin or rearrange it; Wireframe replaces the surface with beams along its edges.

Deform

Move the points already there: Twist, Bend, Spline wrap, Taper, Wave, Noise, Displace, Spherify, Cast, Smooth and Shrinkwrap.

Stacks

A whole ready-made stack in one go: Eroded Rock, Ripple Panel, Twisted Column, Fence Run and Screw Ring.

Order matters because each stage works only with what the stage above hands it. A twist below a Subdivide bends a smooth surface; above it, the twist has only eight corners to move. If a deformer looks blocky or does nothing, add a Subdivide above it.

• Boolean cuts with another object, using that object with its own stack applied. Delete the cutter and the boolean passes the mesh through unchanged.
• Shrinkwrap settles onto a named object, and Spline wrap bends along a named curve.
• Displace pushes the surface out by the height map of the object's own material, or by built-in noise.

The Sculpt section lets you brush one selected object in place, with the rest of the scene around it. Switch to it from the section pill. The brushes run down the left and their settings fill the right column.

1. 1
   Pick the object — Select one mesh and switch to Sculpt, or switch first and then click the mesh.
2. 2
   Make it editable if asked — A primitive or other generator cannot be sculpted as it is. Press Make editable in the prompt over the viewport, or Make editable and sculpt in the panel. The shape does not change.
3. 3
   Brush — Pick a brush and drag across the surface. Add raises and Dig pushes in; hold ⌘ or Ctrl to dig for one stroke.
4. 4
   Finish — Press Done, select another object, or switch section. Your strokes are written to the object.

Draw

Raises a smooth bump along the surface.

Clay

Builds up material in flat layers — the everyday brush.

Inflate

Balloons the surface outward.

Smooth

Relaxes and softens the surface under the brush.

Flatten

Planes the surface toward its average height.

Pinch

Draws material together to sharpen a seam.

Crease

Pinches a sharp ridge; switch to Dig for a groove.

Grab

Drags a region of the surface with the pointer.

Stamp

Presses a shape onto the surface. Pick the shape under Stamp shape in the panel.

Mask

Paints protection: masked areas resist the other brushes.

The brush panel holds:

• Size, Strength (called Rate for Smooth and Opacity for Mask; Grab has none) and Hardness, then Add / Dig — Paint / Erase for the Mask brush.
• Symmetry — Mirror strokes across the object's own X, Y or Z axis. It starts on, across X.
• Mask — Clear and Invert.
• Density — Subdivide adds detail to a low-poly object and shows how many triangles it would leave. When that is over the limit, it is disabled and suggests Mold.
• Pen — appears once a pen is used: pressure for strength and for size, and Pencil only, so only the pen sculpts and fingers move the camera.
• Open in Mold and Done.

Each brush's key is printed in its tooltip — the same keys as in Mold — and [ and ] shrink and grow the brush. On a phone the brushes are in the Brushes sheet.

⌘Z steps back one stroke at a time while you sculpt, and a Subdivide joins the strokes before it into one step. Once you finish, the whole session becomes a single Sculpt step in Undo history. The object keeps its position, UVs and materials.

A procedural object is built by a network of nodes instead of by editing polygons. Each node does one job — make a primitive, scatter points, copy a shape onto them — and passes its result on. Change a number anywhere and everything after it rebuilds.

1. 1
   Convert the object — Select it and choose Mesh ▸ Make procedural. It looks the same: its mesh becomes the first node.
2. 2
   Open the network — In Modeling, open the Procedural page beside the section pill. The network appears beside the model.
3. 3
   Add and wire nodes — Click in the network and press Tab to add a node. Drag between sockets to wire nodes together, and select a node to edit its values.

A number, switch or vector can become a parameter on the object itself. Promote it and it appears on the inspector's Procedural tab, where you can tune the object without opening the network.

A number can also be an expression. Type = followed by something like ch("steps") * 0.2 to follow a parameter, or $F to change with the timeline.

On a phone, the object's Properties sheet has Edit network, which opens the network full screen with canvas, parameters and data views. It is there while Procedural vNext beta is on in Preferences, which it is by default.

The Nodes pane shows a procedural object's network next to the model it builds. You can open it from several places:

• The Procedural page in Modeling.
• Edit nodes — in the context bar, the Mesh menu, the outliner's right-click menu and the object's Procedural page. It opens the pane without changing section.
• Window ▸ Nodes, whatever is selected.
• A pane's own view menu, in a split viewport.

The pane is for a computer or a tablet held sideways. On a phone the network opens full screen from the object's Properties sheet.

Each card is a node, with inputs on its left edge and outputs on its right. A socket's colour says what it carries — geometry, points, instances, curves, pieces or numbers — and its shape says data (square) or a single value (round); every socket is also labelled. Whatever reaches the Output node is the object: it is what renders and exports.

Some nodes, such as a For Each loop or a subnet, hold a network of their own. Open network steps inside, the breadcrumb at the top shows where you are, and Back steps out.

The pane follows the selection. Select something without a network and it keeps showing the last one, with a note — and a button to make the object procedural when it has a mesh. The pin in the pane's header holds it on one object.

Drag from one socket to another to wire them. Sockets that cannot take the wire fade while you drag; a refused wire says why and offers a converting node when one exists.

• Right-click a node — Rename, Bypass, Preview in the 3D view, Set as output, Duplicate, Copy, Delete, Delete and reconnect, Zoom to this node; plus Open network on a node that holds one, and Update or Make local copy on a saved network.
• Right-click the canvas — Add node…, Paste, Tidy the network, Frame selection, Fit the network, Deselect nodes.
• Right-click a wire, or ⌥-click it, to delete it.

Once you click in the network it takes the keys below. They are the same in every keyboard layout, and the same as in Paint's node editor. ⌘Z, ⌘S, Space and ? still reach the rest of the app.

The palette adds nodes to a network. Open it by pressing Tab in the network, choosing Add in the pane's header, double-clicking empty canvas, or picking Add node… from the canvas's right-click menu. Type to search, and press ⏎ to add the highlighted node near where the palette opened.

Let go of a wire on empty canvas and the palette lists only nodes with a matching socket, each naming which one. The node you pick arrives already connected.

Before you type, the palette lists:

• Assets — networks saved to your library. Picking one adds it as a single node linked to the saved network.
• Recent — the last few nodes you added.
• Every node, grouped under Input, Primitive, Curve, Points, Instances, Modify, Faces, Group, Combine, Value and attribute.

Once you type, the groups give way to one list of matches, each naming its group.

The parameter panel sits beside the canvas when the pane is wide and under it when the pane is narrow. Drag the rule between them to resize it, or hide it to a strip with a button to bring it back. What it shows depends on the selection:

No node selected

The network: node and wire counts, faces built and how long that took, any problems, and its Object parameters. Each parameter can be renamed, given a Min, Max and Step, reordered, or unpromoted, which hands its current value back to the node.

One node

That node's values. Type or drag a number, or start with = to write an expression.

Several nodes

A count, with Bypass and Delete for all of them.

In an expression, ch("steps") * 0.2 follows a parameter, $F follows the timeline's frame, $T its time in seconds and $FPS its frame rate, and pi is available. The result shows as you type, and a mistake is pointed out without changing the value. A value set by a wire or by an object parameter says where it comes from.

The arrow beside a value promotes it: name it, and it becomes a parameter with a control on the object's Procedural page. The node reads it back through ch().

Starters are ready-made networks with their parameters already promoted, so the first thing you do with one is drag its sliders. The gallery leads with architecture — a skybridge arcology, a botanical conservatory, a transit hub, a helix high-rise, a terrace habitat, a vaulted pavilion and a city block. It also has everyday pieces: shelving, a picket fence, a spiral tower, a staircase, a pipe run, a brick wall, a rock scatter and a window grid.

• Create ▸ Procedural… or Starter networks… under Generator on the create rail — the gallery of every starter.
• An empty Nodes pane — four starters, with More starters… for the rest.
• Modeling's Procedural page — two shelves, Starters and Yours.
• On a phone — the Create sheet leads with the starters, and in Modeling the dock's Library sheet has the same Procedural page.

Picking a starter builds it as a new object, in one undo step. The rock scatter, window grid and pipe run work on something you have — a surface, a mesh, a curve. Select a suitable object first and the tile offers Apply to “name” beside New.

Yours holds networks you saved. In the Nodes pane, ⋯ ▸ Save network as asset… keeps the network in your library so any scene can use it; a saved tile's own ⋯ renames or deletes it. Drag one into a network to add it as a linked node, or onto a non-procedural object to make it procedural with a copy of the network.

A cloner repeats an object, and an effector varies the copies. Together they build a hundred of something without modelling a hundred of anything, and the count, spacing and variation stay editable.

1. 1
   Pick the source — Select the object to repeat. With nothing selected, the cloner starts with a new cube.
2. 2
   Add a cloner — Click Cloner on the create rail, or pick one of its Setup arrangements: Grid wall, Radial ring, Spiral steps or Jittered grid.
3. 3
   Choose the arrangement — Set the mode and count on the inspector's Cloner tab.
4. 4
   Vary it — Add an effector from the same Cloner button, or use Add an existing effector… on the Cloner tab.

Linear

Copies in a straight line.

Grid

Copies filling a 3D grid.

Radial

Copies around a ring.

Onto object

One copy on each point, each face, or spread over the surface of another object — rivets on a panel, grass on a hill.

Along curve

Copies distributed along a curve.

Put several objects under one cloner and Pick decides whether the copies take them in turn or at random.

Plain

Applies its offsets evenly to every copy it reaches.

Random

Jitters each copy by up to its offsets — the one that stops a grid looking like a grid.

Step

Ramps from nothing to its offsets across the copies.

Target

Aims the copies at it.

Time

Applies its offsets per second, so the copies keep moving with no keyframes.

Each effector has a falloff — a sphere, box, cylinder or linear region, or none for every copy — so it can act on part of the cloner and fade out over the rest.

Simulation makes things move on their own: objects that fall and collide, objects that shatter, cloth that drapes, hair that sways, particles, smoke, fire and liquid. Every one of them is driven by the timeline — there is no Run button. Press play, or drag the playhead, and the simulation follows.

1. 1
   Select an object — Simulation acts on what you select. With nothing selected the options are greyed out and say why.
2. 2
   Choose what it should do — Right-click it and open Simulate, or use the inspector's +, or Make it in the Simulation section: Make it fall, Make it a collider, Make it break, Make it cloth, Make it smoke, Make it burn, Pour liquid from it or Add hair.
3. 3
   Press play — The first frame is the object as you built it; every frame after is worked out from the one before.

Each simulation's page in the inspector opens on the few settings that matter: a row of presets (Wood, Metal, Rubber for a body; Silk, Cotton, Denim for cloth; Smoke, Fire, Water, Honey for a volume), a Quality choice of Draft, Good or High, and up to five sliders. Everything else is under More settings.

Quality

Trades detail for speed. Draft plays smoothly on a phone; High is for a final look. If you change a setting under More settings that Quality controls, it reads Custom.

Scrubbing

Frames you have already played are kept, so dragging the playhead back is instant. A thin green bar under the timeline's ruler marks them. Changing a setting re-simulates from the first frame.

Pause

Pause stops every simulation where it is. Dragging the playhead while paused still shows that exact frame.

Bake

Bodies bake to keyframes and cloth to shape keys, from the Bake row on their pages, so the result plays back without simulating and exports to other apps.

A material describes how a surface responds to light: its colour, how rough or metallic it is, and whether it is transparent. The materials bar along the bottom holds the materials this scene owns. Make, assign and open them there.

1. 1
   Select the object — Click it in the viewport or the outliner.
2. 2
   Pick a surface — Click Library on the materials bar to open a catalogue of a few thousand free CC0 surfaces with their texture maps.
3. 3
   Apply it — Click a surface. It lands on the selected object and in the bar, and the library stays open so you can try others.
4. 4
   Adjust it — Double-click its swatch, or press Edit, to open it in the material editor.

To reuse a material, drag its swatch onto an object, or select objects and press Apply. Editing a shared material changes every object wearing it. New makes an empty one.

The ⋯ beside Apply holds rename, duplicate, edit as nodes, select the objects wearing it, and delete. The ✕ at the end closes the bar; Window ▸ Materials brings it back.

The library, in the left column, is where you bring in models and surfaces rather than make them. Open it with Assets at the right of the top bar. The ✕ at the top of the column closes it.

• Assets — in every section that builds a scene.
• Generate — in Standard.
• Procedural and UV — in Modeling.
• Rigging — in Animation.

Rendering and Generate image & video use the whole column for their own settings instead.

Assets holds models and surfaces, both those that ship with Studio and those you saved. Narrow it with the search field, the source menu (Materials, Models, Saved or Community) and the category menu. Surface search works by meaning, so “rusty metal” finds surfaces nobody named rusty; model search matches names.

Click a model to place it, or drag it to where you want it in the viewport. Click a surface to put it on the selected object — with nothing selected it waits in the materials bar — or drag it onto an object. Offline, the grid shows only what is on this device.

Generate makes a new material or 3D model from a description, or a model from an image, and puts it in this scene and your library. It is the same maker as the viewport header's Generate button.

The material editor shows the one material you have open: its name, how many objects wear it, a preview ball that updates as you work, a gallery of starting looks, the shading model, and the channel pages. It opens in the left column.

• Double-click a swatch in the materials bar.
• Press Edit on the materials bar.
• Press Edit on the inspector's Material tab, when the object wears a shared material.

Under the ball, Apply to selection puts the material on the selected meshes, and two buttons open it as nodes or save it to your library. The look gallery offers finished starting points — plastics, metals, glass, stylized and glowing surfaces — each shown as a real render. It also links to the full Library for textured surfaces like wood or rust.

The channels are split across pages:

Color

The base colour.

Specular

Roughness and metalness, plus a clearcoat.

Glass

Makes a surface refract, with its index of refraction, thickness and absorption colour.

Luminance

Light the surface gives off.

Relief

Normal, height and occlusion maps.

Alpha

A plain fade or a cutout.

Every channel takes a texture map as well as a value, in a slot on its own page.

Shading picks how the surface is lit: Realistic (the default), Toon with a number of bands, Matcap, lit by a captured image instead of your lamps, or Flat, with no lighting. Any of them can add an ink Outline, and Shading needs a shared material. Pages that cannot affect the chosen model are hidden — Flat has no Relief, and Matcap has no Specular or Luminance.

The editor shares the left column with the library: while a material is open, the editor takes the column, and closing it brings the library back. Right-click its header to move it to the other column or float it, and both can be on screen at once.

Add lighting from Light on the create rail. A new scene has none of its own; until you add some, the viewport lends a neutral studio light and the outliner says Studio light is on. That stand-in goes as soon as you add a lamp, a Sun or an Environment, so light the scene before you judge a material or render.

1. 1
   Add an Environment — Light ▸ Environment surrounds the scene with an HDRI — a photographed sphere of light that lights from every direction and fills every reflection.
2. 2
   Add a Sun — Light ▸ Sun adds the world's directional light. In an environment-lit scene it is the only thing casting a shadow.
3. 3
   Adjust them — Click the Environment or Sun row in the outliner's World group to see its settings in the inspector.

The Environment's settings are its map, intensity and rotation, Show for whether it appears behind the subject, and how blurred it looks there. The Sun's are Height, Heading and Strength; Match, which aims it at the environment map's own sun; and When — Always, Auto (only while the scene has no lamps) or Off.

Lamps are objects with their own transform, so you place and aim them like anything else:

Point

Light in every direction from one spot.

Directional

Parallel rays from infinitely far away.

Spot

A cone with a soft edge.

Area

A rectangle of light. The bigger it is, the softer the shadow.

Ambient

Lifts everything evenly and casts nothing. In the Create menu.

IES

A spot carrying a real fixture's measured beam.

A lamp's settings are on the inspector's Object tab, under Light: kind, intensity, colour or colour temperature in Kelvin, and shadows, then what its kind needs — falloff, cone angle and softness, or an Area light's size and shape. An Area light can emit an image, such as a softbox photo or a window. A Spot's IES row picks a ready-made beam or imports a manufacturer's .ies file.

A Rig is a set of lamps arranged for you — the fastest way from an unlit scene to a lit one:

Three-point

A bright key to one side, a softer fill opposite, and a rim behind the subject.

Studio softbox

Two large sources high and close, for even product lighting with soft shadows.

Dramatic rim

One hard back-light with a very dim front fill.

Rigging puts a skeleton inside a mesh and works out how much each bone moves each part of the surface, so turning a shoulder bends the arm instead of tearing it. In the Animation section, the Rigging page holds four numbered steps: 1 · Skeleton, 2 · Skin, 3 · Controls and 4 · Motion.

1. 1
   Start from a T-pose — Arms straight out, legs slightly apart, facing front or back.
2. 2
   Select the character — A single mesh, or — for a character made of several meshes, such as body, armour and hair — the group.
3. 3
   Auto-rig — Press Auto-rig from T-pose. It fits a 21-joint humanoid skeleton to the body and solves the skin weights. The mesh now deforms with the bones.
4. 4
   Fix any joint — Every joint is an ordinary object. Move one that landed wrong, then press Re-bind weights.
5. 5
   Add motion — Open the motion library, preview a clip on your character, and press Add to character.

For a multi-mesh character, the skeleton is measured from the largest mesh — the body — and every part is bound in one shared solve. Binding parts one at a time weights each without the others, and they come apart when posed.

The Skeleton step can also start from a template — humanoid, quadruped or chain — for shapes auto-rig does not measure. Add bone grows a child joint from the selected one, and Mirror copies off-centre joints across X.

Bind mesh to skeleton becomes Re-bind weights once a binding exists, and re-binding replaces the old weights. Undo does not remove a binding; use Unbind mesh.

IK lets you drag a hand or foot and have the limb follow. Add control rig puts IK on both arms and legs and a look-at on the head; Add IK to limb, on a hand or foot bone, does one chain; Bake IK turns posed chains into ordinary keyframes.

The motion library holds more than 2,500 motion-captured clips. Open it from the Motion step or Animate ▸ Motion library…. A preview plays on your own character at its real scale and adds nothing to the scene until you press Add to character, which writes ordinary keyframes.

Before adding a clip you can mirror it, keep it in place, change its speed, and adjust the arms and stance. Clips retarget to your character's proportions but need a skeleton the library can read as humanoid; when it cannot, the Rigging page names the missing joints. On a phone, tapping a clip applies it without a preview.

The viewport has its own free camera that is not part of the document. Add a camera object when the framing matters: it remembers a position, a lens and an aspect, it can be animated, and a render looking through it uses its framing. Its settings are on the inspector's Lens tab.

1. 1
   Add a camera — Click Camera on the create rail, or make one from the current view in the viewport header's View menu.
2. 2
   Look through it — Press the camera icon in the Lens tab's header.
3. 3
   Compose — Orbit, pan and dolly. While you look through the camera, these move the camera itself.
4. 4
   Leave — Press the icon again. The free camera returns to exactly where it was.

Lens

A lens preset, Focal length (or angle of view), Project (Perspective or Parallel), Shift and Clip. A short lens exaggerates depth; a long one flattens it.

Frame

The delivery gate, its Pixels, how it Fits, and the Sensor.

Focus

Depth of field: switch it on, then set Focus on, Distance and Aperture.

Aim

Aim at a target to track, Frame subject to fill the frame with the selection, and Align to view to put the camera where the viewport is.

Camera moves made while looking through it are navigation, not edits: they are not in the undo history, so ⌘Z undoes your last change to the document instead. Moving the camera with the gizmo or its transform fields is an ordinary, undoable edit.

Render ▸ Camera move keys a ready-made move onto the clip — Orbit, Dolly in, Truck, Pedestal or Crane — and starts a clip if there is none. Curved moves follow their path, and a camera aimed at a target stays on it the whole way.

The transport runs under the viewport in every section, so a scene with motion can be played wherever you are working.

• Play and pause, Back to start and Play backwards.
• The playback mode — Loop, Play once or Ping-pong — once there is a clip.
• A scrub bar to drag the playhead, and the current frame against the clip's length.
• Timeline, which opens and closes the timeline beneath it.

The transport also says when something else shapes playback: a speed other than 1×, or procedural motion moving things without keys. Stepping one frame at a time has a key; the ? sheet shows it for your keymap.

The timeline is where keyframes live. It opens from the transport, fills the bottom of the Animation section, and shows the selected object's animated properties as rows against time.

1. 1
   Start a clip — Type a Length in the timeline header.
2. 2
   Set the first key — Select the object, put the playhead on the first frame and press Set key. It records position, rotation and scale.
3. 3
   Set the next key — Move the playhead, move the object, and press Set key again. Or turn on Auto, and every move you make records a key until you turn it off.
4. 4
   Play it — Press Play in the transport. Studio fills in the frames between keys.

Position, rotation and scale are keyed per axis, so each has three rows. Other numeric properties are keyed with the diamond beside them in the inspector, and get a row here once animated.

The header holds Length (or Frame, once there is a clip), the frame rate, Play options (mode, direction, speed and in and out points), Fit, Snap to whole frames, Set key and Auto.

Drag a key along its row to re-time it, or drag a box across several to move them together; copy and paste work while the timeline has focus. With keys selected, the easing strip — Linear, Ease in, Ease out, Ease and Hold — sets how the value travels, and Curve… opens a library of easing shapes. Right-click a key for more, and double-click the ruler to drop a marker.

Curves is the other mode of this panel: it draws each track as a curve you can shape directly. It is also at Window ▸ Graph editor.

+ Motion adds motion without keys — a preset such as a spin, a bob or a flicker that loops forever and adds on top of any keys. Motion-captured clips for a character are in the motion library; see Rigging a character.

The Rendering section turns the scene into a finished image. Its settings are in the left column and the render takes over the viewport. Render ▸ Render viewport (instant) is the one-click version from anywhere.

1. 1
   Switch to Rendering — Pick it from the section pill.
2. 2
   Choose the engine — Path traced, the default, traces light for a photographic result. Realtime is the viewport's own drawing — instant, and the only engine that draws splats and point clouds.
3. 3
   Start it — Press Render scene (Render image under Realtime). A path-traced image starts noisy and cleans up as it runs; the button becomes Stop render, with Pause beside it.
4. 4
   Save it — On the Output tab, set the resolution and format, then press Render still. While it runs, the button reads Finish & save — press it to write the frame reached so far.

A render always draws your materials and the scene's own lighting, whatever the viewport's shading is. The exceptions are Display's two Preview lighting swaps: while either is on, the shading strip reads Preview and the render is lit that way too.

The Quality tab decides how far the image is traced:

• Samples — how many passes before it stops. Drag to 0 for Unlimited.
• Quality — Fast, Balanced or High, with the exact Bounces under it. Two bounces suit a single opaque object; a room lit through a window needs eight to twelve.
• Glass depth — how many transparent surfaces a ray may pass through. A tumbler needs four and a shelf of them twelve; dark or muddy glass usually needs more.
• Smooth the preview (on) — cleans the live image while it is noisy, and fades out before the end, so the saved image is the raw trace.
• AI denoise when finished (off) — runs a denoiser once the frame converges, and does change the final image. Needs WebGPU.
• Adaptive sampling — spends each pass where the frame is still noisy. Good for a subject on a plain backdrop.
• Depth of field, the frame's Aspect, a render Region, and Tiles under Performance.

The Look tab grades the result: a Look preset, Exposure, a Grade group (tone mapping, temperature, contrast, saturation, film grain, bloom, vignette) and a Lens group (aberration, sharpening). Grading re-composites the traced image, so it costs no samples.

The Backdrop group is the exception — it is traced, so changing it restarts the image. Behind shows a flat Colour, the HDRI, or Alpha for a cut-out with real transparency. With the HDRI behind the scene you can blur and dim it separately from the lighting.

The Output tab saves stills at the viewport's size, HD through 5K, or a long edge you type, as PNG, JPG or WebP. An animation renders frame by frame to a zip of images; under Realtime it can encode an H.264 or WebM video instead. This session keeps what you rendered since opening the scene.

To check timing rather than make a final, Render ▸ Playblast animation records the clip from the live viewport as a video in a few seconds.

Send to, in the top bar, opens the selected object in Paint (the texture painter) or Mold (the sculpting app) without exporting a file. On a narrower window use File ▸ Send object to, or the viewport's right-click menu.

Paint — texture it

Gives the object layers, masks and painted maps. Paint's Send material to Studio… puts the result back on the same object here.

Mold — sculpt it

Offered for an object that has never been sculpted.

Mold — continue

Reopens the sculpt this object came from, with its history.

Mold — sculpt it fresh

Starts a new sculpt from the mesh as it is now, including your changes since.

From Mold, Update in Studio brings the sculpt back onto the object. For light work without leaving Studio, use the Sculpt section.

Saving keeps the scene so you can come back to it. Exporting hands a copy to something that is not Studio.

Press ⌘S to save. The scene is written to this browser first, so nothing waits on the network, then backed up to your Scenes library, where every device you sign in on can open it. ⇧⌘S saves a copy under a new name, and ⌘O opens a saved scene.

The save chip beside the scene's name shows how far a save has got — see The top bar for its five states.

File ▸ Export… opens one dialog, organised by where the file is going:

3D model

To open in another 3D tool: GLB (the default), glTF, FBX, OBJ, STL (for printing) or USDZ (opens in AR on an iPhone). GLB, glTF and FBX carry animation (FBX without skin weights, textures or shape keys). Options cover the whole scene or the selection, compression, and embedded or separate textures.

Game ready

A GLB option, also at File ▸ Export game-ready GLB…. Each mesh gets three lighter levels of detail, tangents, one packed occlusion/roughness/metal texture and a simple collision shape. Animation and hierarchy are left out. For a scan, run Mesh ▸ Make game ready… first.

Web

To put on a page: a self-contained page, an embed snippet, a React component or a plain three.js module. The last two download as a zip of the code and the scene.

Publish

Studio hosts the scene and gives you a live link.

Scene file

An .mxs copy of the document itself, including what model formats cannot carry: generators, modifiers, animation and render settings.

Press ? at any time, or choose Window ▸ Mouse & keyboard…, to see every key and mouse gesture and to choose your keyboard layout.

The camera gestures of Maya, Blender, Cinema 4D and Spline all work at once, because they use different buttons and modifiers: ⌥-drag orbits as in Maya and Cinema 4D, middle-drag orbits as in Blender, and space-drag or right-drag pans. Whatever your hand already knows works from the first drag.

The letter keys differ, because those apps put move, rotate and scale on different letters. Studio ships three layouts — mixos (Maya-style), Blender and Cinema 4D — chosen in the ? sheet or in Preferences.

The Generate image & video section makes a finished image or short video from the scene you built. Rendering traces light; this hands a picture of your scene to a generative model and gets a new picture back. Its settings are on the Image & video page in the left column, and Render ▸ Generate image with AI… or Generate video with AI… takes you there from anywhere.

1. 1
   Frame the shot — Set up the view or camera you want. Generation starts from the current camera view.
2. 2
   Make the still — On the Image tab, describe the picture or start from a look — Photoreal, Product, Cinematic or Illustrated — and set Scene fidelity. Generate image shows its credit cost on the button.
3. 3
   Prepare the motion — On the Video tab, press Prepare under Scene motion to capture your animation. The still from the Image tab becomes the Style image.
4. 4
   Make the video — Describe the finished video and set Video length; the price updates as you drag. Then generate it.

Keep shape

Holds every form exactly as modelled.

Polish

Refines while keeping the idea.

Rethink

Allows a bigger redesign.

Video settings holds the rest. Quality picks the engine — Precise (the default), Kling or Cinematic — each with its own range of lengths.

Motion guidance chooses what the motion capture records. Precise, the default, captures the scene's depth, so the video follows your real geometry and animation closely. Shaded captures the shaded view instead, a looser guide; the page says when an engine works better with it.

The 3D words this manual uses without stopping to explain them.

Mesh

A surface made of flat faces meeting at edges and points. Every solid object in a scene is one, however smooth it looks — smoothness is small faces plus shading.

Vertex / point

A corner. Move it and every face touching it changes shape.

Edge

The line between two points.

Face / polygon

A flat patch bounded by edges — three of them makes a triangle, four a quad. Quads are easier to model with; everything becomes triangles by the time it is drawn.

Topology

How a mesh is divided up, as distinct from what shape it is. Two objects can look identical and have topology that makes one a pleasure to edit and the other unusable.

Normal

The direction a face points, which is how the renderer knows which side is outside. A face with its normal reversed goes invisible or black.

UV

A coordinate on a flat square, assigned to every point on the mesh, so a texture knows where to land. Making them is unwrapping.

Material

A description of how a surface answers light — colour, roughness, metalness, transparency. Not a colour: a material with no light is black.

PBR

Physically based rendering. Materials described in terms that behave like real ones, so the same surface looks right under any lighting.

Map / texture

An image feeding one channel of a material. A colour map paints it; a roughness map says where it is shiny; a normal map fakes detail without adding geometry.

HDRI

A photographed sphere of light used as the scene's environment. It lights everything from every direction at once and fills the reflections — the fastest route to a scene that looks photographed.

Generator

An object that builds geometry from parameters or from other objects and keeps them live. A primitive cube is one; so are lathes, sweeps and cloners.

Modifier

A stage in a stack that changes a mesh on the way to the screen without changing the mesh underneath.

Sculpting

Shaping a dense mesh with brushes, as if it were clay, instead of moving points and faces one at a time.

Transform

Position, rotation and scale — where an object is, which way it faces and how big it is.

Pivot / origin

The point an object rotates and scales around. Put it in the wrong place and a door swings from its middle.

Parent / child

A containment relationship. Moving a parent moves its children; the child keeps its own transform relative to the parent.

Keyframe

A recorded value at a moment in time. Two of them and the application fills in everything between.

Easing

The shape of the travel between two keyframes. It is the difference between motion that reads as deliberate and motion that reads as mechanical.

Rig / skinning

A skeleton inside a mesh, and the weights saying how much each bone moves each vertex.

Path tracing

Rendering by firing rays into the scene and averaging what they find. It starts noisy and cleans up the longer it runs.

Sample

One of those rays, per pixel. More samples means less noise and more time.

Bounce

How many surfaces a ray may hit before it is given up on. Samples decide how clean the image is; bounces decide how much light reaches it at all.

Denoise

Cleaning up a partly-converged render rather than waiting for it to finish converging.

Gizmo

The handles drawn on a selection for dragging it — and the axis marker in the viewport corner, which is a different gizmo doing a different job.

Find your symptom below. Most problems are a setting doing exactly what it says somewhere you were not looking.

The viewport

• The viewport shows a message instead of the scene. Studio draws with WebGPU and falls back to WebGL2. If the browser offers neither, the viewport explains why and links to browsers that work. On WebGL2, splats and particles are hidden and say so.
• A message says the viewport hit an error. Reload the page, then choose File ▸ Autosave ▸ Recover autosaved scene before you add anything — Studio opens empty, and autosave keeps the copy until you do.
• It is not responding to clicks. A tool is probably armed and waiting in the operator panel (the operator bar on a phone). Press Esc to cancel it.
• It looks cropped, or the grid is cut off. Those are the frame guides showing what will render. Turn them off with View ▸ Frame ▸ Off in the viewport header.
• It is stuttering. Open Stats from the outliner header to find the heaviest objects. Lowering Resolution or Shadows in the Display menu buys headroom without touching the scene, and Render ▸ Analyze performance… and Optimize scene look at the scene itself.
• Textures look soft on a phone or tablet. To stay within the device's memory, Studio draws textures at up to 512 pixels on a phone and 1024 on a tablet, and renders on that device use the same. Exports keep the full-resolution textures.

Lighting and surfaces

• Everything went dark when I added a light. Your first lamp, Sun or Environment switches off the stand-in studio light, so one dim lamp can leave the scene darker than before. Add an Environment and a Sun, or a Three-point rig, from Light on the create rail.
• One object is black. Check its UVs on the UV page — a texture on an object without UVs has nowhere to land.
• My render does not look like the viewport. A render always uses your materials and the scene's lighting, so a Clay or Wire viewport will look different. If the shading strip reads Preview, turn off both Preview lighting rows in Display.
• The render is noisy. Let it run longer or raise Samples; switch on AI denoise when finished for the final image. Dark or muddy glass needs more Glass depth, and a dim interior more Bounces.

Objects and editing

• An imported model is tiny, huge or nowhere to be seen. Pick the right unit in the Import as prompt, or scale the model in the inspector afterwards. To find it, right-click its row in the outliner and choose Frame.
• My edit went to the wrong object. Check the outliner: it shows what is selected and what is parented to what.
• The modelling tools are greyed out. Hover one to see what it needs, such as “Select exactly two faces”. The selection also clears after every operation on purpose.
• A deformer did nothing, or came out blocky. Add a Subdivide stage above it in the modifier stack.
• Sculpt will not start. Select exactly one mesh. A primitive or other generator needs Make editable first — the prompt over the viewport offers it.
• A control I remember has gone. You are probably in a different section, or the context bar is hiding it because it does not apply to the current selection. ⌘K finds every command by name.

Saving and opening

• Studio opened an empty scene. Studio never reopens a scene by itself. Press ⌘O to open one from your Scenes library.
• I lost unsaved work to a reload or crash. Before you add anything, choose File ▸ Autosave ▸ Recover autosaved scene. It brings back the last autosaved copy and replaces what is open. Discard autosave deletes that copy for good.
• The save chip says This device. The scene is saved in this browser, but its backup has not reached your account — for example because you are offline or your storage is full. Fix that, then press ⌘S or click the chip.
• I cannot find my scene. Press ⌘O. If it is not in your Scenes library, check the save chip on the device where you made it: This device means it never reached your account, and Unsaved means it was never saved.