Docs / Building a tour

3D Scenes

3D scenes are small worlds that visitors walk through in first person. You build them from cubes, spheres, planes and GLB models, add textures, a sky and lights, and make objects clickable, animated or trigger actions when someone walks into them.

Create a scene

In the 3D Scenes section, create a new scene. It starts as "New 3D Scene" with a 50 × 50 white floor and a green 1 m cube, so you have something to stand on right away. Rename the scene so you can find it when you link to it.

Visitors enter a scene through an Open 3D Scene action on a hotspot, a map pin, a Custom HTML page or another 3D object.

The 3D editor viewport

The scene editor shows your scene with a grid and axes. A short help line in the top-left corner lists the controls for your device.

Move, rotate and scale

The toolbar on the left of the viewport switches the transform tool. Drag the handles (the gizmo) on the selected object:

• World / Local switches whether the handles follow the world axes or the object's own rotation. Scale always uses Local.
• Snap rounds values while you drag: moves in 0.25 m steps, rotation in 15° steps, scale in 0.1 steps. Hold Ctrl while dragging to flip snapping temporarily.
• To cancel a drag and put the object back, press Esc or right-click (on touch, tap outside the handle).
• Shift+D (or Ctrl/Cmd+D) duplicates the selection; Delete or Backspace deletes it. The spawn point cannot be deleted.

You can also type exact values for position, rotation (in degrees) and scale in the object inspector. Distances are in meters.

Objects

Color, texture and opacity

• Color: a solid color.
• Texture: an image from Image Assets wrapped on the object.
• Opacity: 1 is solid, lower values are see-through. At 0 the object is invisible in the tour but is still solid and still clickable. Use this for invisible walls or invisible click areas. In the editor such objects show a blue outline so you can still find them.

Model objects use the materials inside the GLB file, so color and texture do not apply to them.

GLB models

While a model loads in the editor, a blue wireframe box stands in for it. After loading, the box is replaced by the model's bounding box, which is what you select and move. In the tour, every mesh of the model is solid and clickable, and the player is frozen in place until all models of the scene have loaded, so nobody falls through a floor that has not appeared yet. The loading message "Loading 3D models…" is shown meanwhile.

Clickable objects

Any object can have actions, using the same list as hotspots: Open Panorama, Show Image, Play a Video, Play an Audio, Open a PDF file, Open 3D Scene, Open URL, Execute JavaScript code and Show Iframe (see Action types). In the tour, the cursor changes to a hand over objects that have actions, and one click or tap runs all of them. Dragging only looks around; it never triggers an action.

Trigger zones

Turn on Is Trigger to make an object a trigger zone. In the tour a trigger:

• is not solid: visitors walk through it,
• is not clickable,
• runs its actions once each time a visitor enters it. Leaving and entering again runs them again.

Triggers work with rotated, scaled and animated objects, and with models. In the editor they are shown half-transparent with an orange outline. Set the opacity to 0 if the zone should be invisible in the tour. A trigger in a doorway with an Open Panorama action makes a natural exit.

Animation

Objects can move, rotate and scale over time using keyframes. Open the animation timeline for the selected object:

1. Move the time cursor to a moment on the timeline.
2. Place the object where it should be at that moment.
3. Press Set Keyframe. With Auto-key on, keyframes are recorded as you move the object.

The first keyframe you set after 0 seconds automatically gets a partner at 0 seconds with the object's original pose, so the object has something to move from. Setting a keyframe later than the current duration makes the animation longer.

• Duration: 0.1 to 600 seconds (default 2).
• Loop: on by default; the animation repeats forever. Off plays it once.
• Ease per keyframe: linear, easeIn, easeOut or easeInOut (default). The ease describes the motion towards that keyframe.
• Copy and paste keyframes with Ctrl/Cmd+C and Ctrl/Cmd+V while the timeline is open.
• Play the animation in the editor to preview it.

Rotations are in degrees and are interpolated directly, so a keyframe at 0° followed by one at 360° is one full turn. Animated objects stay solid and clickable while they move, so a moving platform can carry the visitor. In the tour an animated object starts at its first keyframe.

Sky and lights

Skybox

• None: a plain dark background.
• Color: a single background color.
• Panorama: one of the project's panoramas wrapped around the scene as a sky. Good for outdoor scenes.

Lights

Three lights can be switched on or off and dimmed (intensity 0 to 5):

The tour uses exactly the same lights as the editor, so what you see while editing is what visitors get.

Spawn point

The spawn point is where visitors appear when they enter the scene and which way they face. It is shown in the editor as a marker with an arrow for the viewing direction. Select it and move it like any object; rotation only turns it around the vertical axis. It cannot be deleted, duplicated or scaled. The marker stands at foot level; the visitor's eyes are 1.6 m above it. If the spawn point is below or inside the floor, the visitor is lifted onto the surface.

How visitors move

3D scenes in the tour use first-person walking with simple physics. These values are useful when you design a scene:

Controls for visitors are listed in The visitor experience.