The Studio manual

Mixos Studio is a 3D scene application that runs in a browser tab. You build or import objects, arrange and light a scene, animate it, and render it — no install, no drivers, no upload wait.

This manual covers the whole application, chapter by chapter: the workspace and viewport first, then your scene's structure, modelling, materials and lighting, animation and rendering, and finally the assistant and the keyboard. Each section opens with the idea in plain language and then names the individual controls worth knowing. Read it top to bottom the first time; afterwards each section stands on its own.

The bar across the top of the window is split into three zones that never trade places: identity on the left, the current view in the centre, and utilities on the right. Once you know which third a control lives in, you stop hunting for it.

On the left is the Mixos mark — which takes you home — the app name, and the name of the scene you are working on. The scene name is a button: click it to rename the document, which is also the fastest way to check you are in the file you think you are in.

The centre holds the menu bar and the section switcher, both covered in their own sections below.

The right holds the things that apply to the whole document rather than to your selection: undo and redo, Send to — which hands the selected object across to Paint or Mold — the ? sheet, and your account.

Studio is divided into sections, and the section you are in changes the whole window rather than one panel: the viewport lane, the side column and the available tools all follow it. Modelling controls simply do not apply while you are setting up a render, so they are not there.

This is why sections are a switch in the top bar and not a checkbox inside a panel — a mode with its own layout is a workspace, and giving one two different doors is the scatter this interface has deliberately dismantled.

Seven sections ship with Studio. Standard is the general-purpose arrangement and the one to stay in until you have a reason not to. Modeling puts the mesh tools and an edit-mode-shaped layout in front of you. Shading is for building and assigning materials. UV opens the unwrapping workspace. Animation brings up the timeline and the transport. Rendering turns the viewport lane into the output and the column into the render settings. Generate is the AI creation surface.

You are not limited to those seven. Any arrangement you build can be saved as a section of your own, and saved sections sit in the same strip as the built-in ones; the strip's ⋯ menu saves, resets and deletes them. If the strip runs out of room, the overflow holds the rest.

The strip along the top of the viewport controls how the scene is drawn rather than what is in it. Nothing here changes your document.

The shading strip is the leftmost control, and its three modes read as a ladder of what each one adds. Wire draws edges only — no materials, no lighting. Clay puts a single clay colour on everything under a fixed studio rig, ignoring both your materials and your lights, so that all you are reading is form. Materials shows your materials under the scene's own lamps and world.

Beside it, the Display menu holds the overlays, the preview-lighting switches, the HDRI backdrop and the viewport quality setting — which runs from Off through Low, Medium, High and Full, with an Auto that picks for your device and a Custom for setting it yourself.

There is also a dedicated overlays button rather than only a menu row, because “what does this actually look like?” is a question asked a dozen times an hour and answered by looking. One click hides the grid, gizmos, handles and selection outline; one click brings them back. It lights up when overlays are OFF — lit here means this viewport is not showing you everything.

The small axis marker in the corner of the viewport shows which way the scene is oriented. It is also a control: clicking one of its axes snaps the camera to look straight down that axis, which is the fast way back to a square front, side or top view after you have orbited somewhere confusing.

The colours are the standard ones and they are worth memorising, because they are the same colours the transform gizmo uses: X is red, Y is green, Z is blue. A red handle on the gizmo and the red axis on this marker are the same direction.

The context bar shows the controls that apply to what you have selected right now, and only those. It is empty with nothing selected, and its contents change as the selection does — which makes it the fastest way to find out what an object can actually do, without reading a menu.

Select one object and it offers the things one object can do. Select several and alignment appears: nine ways to line objects up, three per axis — by their left edges, their centres or their right edges on X, by bottoms, centres or tops on Y, and by backs, centres or fronts on Z. Enter edit mode and the bar switches to whatever your point, edge or polygon selection supports.

Snapping constrains a drag to regular increments so parts line up exactly rather than nearly. The snap chip turns it on, and its settings hold three numbers worth understanding because they are measured in three different things.

Grid spacing is in world units — the distance objects step by when you move them. Rotation step is in degrees, and it applies to every rotate drag. Capture radius is the odd one out: it is measured in screen pixels, not world units, so it stays the same size to your eye at any zoom. That is deliberate — a capture radius in world units would grab everything when you zoomed out and nothing when you zoomed in.

The outliner lists everything in the scene as a hierarchy — objects, cameras, lights and the world itself — and is where you select, rename, group, reorder and reparent. Selecting a row selects the object, and vice versa.

The world is a set of rows in this list rather than a separate dialog: the sun and the environment sit in the hierarchy alongside your objects, because they are part of the scene in exactly the way an object is, and hiding them somewhere else is how new scenes used to end up unlit without their author noticing.

Selecting a row selects the object, and selecting in the viewport highlights the row — they are two views of one selection. Drag a row onto another to parent it, which is how you say “this moves with that”; drag it out again to unparent. Grouping several objects puts them under one parent you can move as a unit.

Each row carries its own visibility and lock toggles. Hiding is a viewport convenience; locking is protection, and it is the answer to accidentally dragging the floor every time you try to select something standing on it.

The toolbar above the outliner filters and reorganises the list without touching the scene — useful once a document holds more than fits on screen.

Search filters the list to objects whose name matches, which is the main argument for naming things as you go. Isolate selection narrows the list to what you have selected and its family. Reveal selection does the opposite and is the one to remember: it unfolds whatever group is hiding the selected object and scrolls to it, so a selection you made in the viewport stops being lost in a collapsed tree. Clear drops the search and every filter at once.

The inspector shows everything about the current selection, organised into tabs rather than one long scroll — transform, the object's own parameters, its material, and its modifiers. Tabs rather than a stack because a long scrolling column buries the control you came for.

Which tabs appear depends on what you have selected, and that is the useful part — the tab row is a list of what this object actually is. Object holds the transform: position, rotation and scale. Shape holds a generator's own parameters, so a parametric cube keeps its width and height as editable numbers. Mesh appears once there is real geometry. Material, Modifiers and UV are what they sound like. Motion adds physics and motion behaviour. A camera gets Lens; a text object gets Text; booleans, cloners, effectors, subdivision and splats each bring their own.

The transform fields and the viewport gizmo are the same values in two places. Dragging the gizmo updates the numbers live, and typing a number moves the object — use the gizmo to explore and the fields to commit.

The Stats page measures what your scene costs to draw — triangles, draw calls and memory — against what this particular device can comfortably handle, and lists the heaviest objects so you know where the weight actually is.

It appears once the document has something in it to measure; an empty scene has nothing to report.

The numbers are measured against this device rather than an absolute standard, because a scene that is comfortable on a desktop can be unusable on a phone. A figure in the clear is fine here and may not be elsewhere.

When a scene is over budget, the heaviest-objects list is where to start — weight is almost never spread evenly, and one imported model usually accounts for most of it. The fixes, in the order worth trying: hide what you are not working on, reuse one object many times rather than importing many copies, and reduce the density of the offender itself.

The create rail adds new things to the scene — primitives, curves, cameras and lights. A new object lands in the scene and becomes the selection, so the inspector is already showing its parameters when it appears.

The rail is grouped by what you are making. Mesh holds the primitives. Curve holds paths. Light is three groups in one: lighting the scene as a whole, individual lamps, and complete rigs for when you want a working setup rather than one lamp. Generator builds geometry from a curve — lathes, sweeps and extrusions. Cloner covers setting up repetition and the effectors that vary it. World holds the scene's own environment. At the end sits Import model, for bringing in your own file.

The modelling rail holds the operations that change geometry. Most of them act on a selection inside edit mode — points, edges or polygons — rather than on a whole object.

The verbs come in three groups. Shape changes form without changing how the mesh is built: Extrude pulls a selection out into new geometry, Inset adds a smaller face inside an existing one, Bevel rounds an edge or corner, and Poke, Smooth, Push and Slide adjust what is already there.

Topology changes how the mesh is built: Loop cut runs a new ring of edges around a shape, Bridge joins two openings with new surface, Connect links selected points, Fill holes closes gaps, and To tris converts faces to triangles.

Remove takes geometry away: Delete face removes a face and leaves the hole, Dissolve removes an edge and merges the faces either side, and Merge collapses selected points into one.

A curve is an editable path rather than a surface, and on its own it renders as nothing. Its value is as an input: the Generator items in the create rail turn a curve into geometry by spinning it, sweeping a profile along it or extruding it, and the Animation section can use one as a path for something to travel along.

The curve verbs appear in the context bar when a curve is selected, and cover adding and removing points, changing how a point behaves — a sharp corner or a smooth tangent — and closing the curve into a loop. Whether a curve is open or closed matters more than it looks: a lathe of an open curve gives you a surface with an edge, and a lathe of a closed one gives you a solid.

Drawing your own. Curve ▸ Draw starts an empty curve with the pen armed, and from then on the viewport shows you the point before you place it: a ghost marker with a crosshair sits where the next click will land, and a dashed band runs to it from the end of the curve in the exact shape the new segment will take. Click for a sharp corner, press and drag for a smooth point whose tangent follows the drag, and click the first point again to close the outline. Backspace takes the last point back; Esc finishes the curve open.

The pen's own strip sits beside the verbs. Plane decides which world axis plane points land on — points go onto a flat plane rather than onto the screen, which is what keeps a drawn outline extrudable from any camera angle; Auto picks whichever plane the view most faces and fixes it once the first point is down. Grid rounds each point to the workspace grid step, and holding Shift while aiming constrains the next point to 15° steps out of the previous one. The readout between them prints exactly where the point will land and how far it is from the last one.

Editing points. Drag a point to move it, drag its handle to reshape the curve either side, and Alt-drag a handle to break the tangent so the two sides move independently. Click anywhere on the line to add a point there — the segment under the cursor lights up to show which piece is about to be split — and double-click a point to flip it between a corner and a smooth curve. Drag across empty viewport to band-select several points at once, then nudge them with the arrow keys, a grid step at a time, or ten with Shift.

When an operation has settings worth adjusting, they appear in the operator panel after it runs, so you can tune the result while watching it update rather than guessing the numbers beforehand. A bevel with the wrong width is a slider away from the right one, not an undo away.

What you are looking at while the panel is open is a preview. Accepting commits it to the document; pressing Esc discards the preview and leaves the mesh exactly as it was, with nothing to undo afterwards.

Some tools arm rather than fire: you pick the tool, then the viewport waits for you to indicate where or how much, and only then does anything happen. The operator bar is the always-visible answer to “what is the app waiting for, and how do I get out of it?” — it names the armed operation and offers Accept and Cancel.

It is a row of its own rather than a floating panel, and that is a fix rather than a style choice: on a phone a floating Accept button ended up underneath the sheet covering it, which made an armed operation impossible to finish or escape.

A material describes how a surface responds to light — its colour, how rough or metallic it is, whether it is transparent. The materials bar assigns and edits the material on the current selection.

The materials bar holds the materials this scene owns. Drag one onto an object to apply it — the same material can be on many objects at once, and editing it changes all of them, which is the point. Double-click a material to open it for editing. The New button makes an empty one.

You do not have to start from scratch: the bar also opens a CC0 surface catalogue of a few thousand ready-made materials, free to use, which is usually faster than building a convincing brick or metal by hand.

The library column is where you bring things in rather than make them, and it holds five pages — Content, Material, Render, Generate and UV. You will not see all five at once: the column shows the pages that apply to what you are doing, so entering the Rendering section brings up Render, and the UV workspace brings up UV.

Content is models and environments, both the ones that ship with Studio and the ones you have saved. Material is the material shelf. The others are the settings surfaces for rendering, AI generation and unwrapping.

The transport runs along the bottom of the Animate section: play and pause, the current frame, and the clip's length and frame rate. Keyframes are set on the selection and appear on the timeline above it.

Animation works by keyframes: you move to a frame, set a value, and Studio fills in the frames between. Setting a key records the current state of the selection at the current frame, and the timeline above the transport shows those keys as markers you can drag to re-time.

Position, rotation and scale are keyed per axis rather than as a single block, so an object can move on X across a whole clip while its Y is held by two keys at either end. The tracks in the timeline reflect that — you will see separate rows per axis.

How a value travels between two keys is its easing, and easing is what separates animation that reads as deliberate from animation that reads as mechanical. For finer control than the presets give, the graph editor shows each track as a curve you can shape directly; it is a mode of the timeline dock rather than a separate panel, under Window ▸ Graph editor.

The Render section turns the scene into a finished image. The render frame follows the guides in the viewport, so what is inside the frame is what you get.

A path-traced render works by sampling: it fires rays into the scene and averages what they find, so an image starts noisy and cleans up the longer it runs. There is no single correct number of samples — you stop when it looks right, and complex lighting takes longer to settle than simple lighting.

Denoising shortens that wait by cleaning up a partly-converged image rather than waiting for it to converge on its own. It is close to free in quality terms at moderate sample counts and is usually worth leaving on.

The assistant sits in its own dock and can operate the scene by running the same commands the menus and the palette run. Asking it to do something and doing it by hand take the same path, so anything it does is undoable exactly like your own edits.

Because it reports what actually happened rather than what was asked, it will tell you when a value was clamped or an operation refused — which makes it useful for finding out why something did not work, not only for doing things.

It is at its best on work that is tedious rather than difficult — repetitive edits, setting many values consistently, and answering “where is the control for this?” without making you go and find it. It is least useful for judgement calls: what a scene should look like is not a thing to delegate.

Anything it does lands in the same undo history as your own edits, so ⌘Z reverses it exactly the way it reverses a click. You are never in a position where you have to accept its work to get rid of it.

Press ? at any time to see every key the application binds, and to choose your keymap.

Studio ships three keymaps — MixOS (Maya-style), Blender and Cinema 4D — because navigation habits are the single largest reason a 3D application feels foreign. If orbiting does not work the way your hands expect, you are almost certainly on the wrong preset rather than fighting the app; change it in the same ? sheet.