Components
Components are where an object's settings live. This page explains what they mean and points out the handful of places where the obvious reading is wrong.
Looking for a specific field, its type or its default? That is the component reference, generated straight from the engine.
Transform
Position in metres, scale as a plain multiplier, rotation in degrees everywhere you can see it.
Every interface (the inspector, patch ports) shows degrees and converts for you. Only when
you read or write rotation in a script do you deal with radians. Math.PI / 2 is your right
angle there.
Look-at
Points an object at a spot in the world, or along an offset from its own position. Handy for signs that face the visitor and lights that track a target.
Animating or setting rotation elsewhere will appear to do nothing. Remove the look-at first.
Geometry
Fifteen built-in shapes — box, sphere, cylinder, capsule, circle, cone, plane, triangle, ring, torus, three polyhedra, extrude and lathe — plus a reference to imported geometry.
Two are worth knowing about:
- Extrude takes an outline you draw and gives it depth. Logos, signs, cut-out shapes.
- Lathe takes a profile and spins it around an axis. Vases, bottles, columns.
Give a box a corner radius above zero and it becomes a rounded box.
Material
How a surface looks. A material is a list of slots rather than a single material, with eight types to choose from and a texture map set per type.
Full treatment: Materials.
Text
Font size is in pixels, where 1000 px works out as one metre in the world. So 72 px is roughly 7 cm tall — small on a table, invisible across a room.
Text lays out asynchronously, so it appears a beat after the rest of the object. That is deliberate: the alternative is a frame of text at the wrong size.
Video and audio
Same shape, different defaults, and the defaults matter:
- Video starts muted and non-positional. Browsers refuse to autoplay video with sound.
- Audio starts unmuted and positional — it gets louder as you approach.
Several objects can play the same file independently, so two televisions showing one clip do not fight over it.
It is a single voice, so playing it again cuts off the first one. Footsteps stutter and gunfire sounds like one shot. Play effects from a script instead — every call starts its own independent sound. → ctx.audio
3D text
Separate from ordinary text: this one is extruded geometry, so it catches light, casts shadows and can carry a material like any other object. Use it for signage and titles that need to sit in the world; use ordinary text for anything that needs to stay readable at a distance.
Skeletons and bones
An imported character arrives with a skeleton and its bones. You rarely touch these directly — they are what lets a model deform when its animation plays, and what an animation step targets when you move a single bone.
Instancer and particles
Two components for "many of something":
- Instancer draws one object's geometry thousands of times in a single call — grass, crowds, asteroid fields. → Prefabs and instancing
- Particle emitter gives you fire, smoke, sparks and rain, also in a single call. → Particles
Path
A curve drawn from points. It can become geometry (a pipe, a rope, a road) or a route for something to follow. → Paths
Camera and extra views
A camera decides what your visitor sees; an extra view renders a second pass for a minimap or a security monitor. → Cameras
Shader graph
A material built as a node graph, for looks the standard types cannot express. → Material graphs
Prefab
Marks an object as an instance of a saved tree you can reuse. → Prefabs and instancing
Shadows and morph targets
Shadows — whether an object casts and receives them, applied to everything inside it.
Morph targets are the blend shapes a model brings with it: facial expressions, a flag furling, a character's weight shifting. Each is a weight from 0 to 1, and all of them can be animated on the timeline.
Physics components
Rigid body decides how the engine moves an object:
- dynamic — falls, collides, gets pushed;
- static — never moves, but stops everything else;
- kinematic — moves only when you move it, and pushes things aside as it goes.
It also carries a multiplayer ownership setting:
| Ownership | Means |
|---|---|
| shared | one object for the whole room; everyone sees the crate in the same place |
| local | everyone simulates their own copy |
A player character must be local. Making it shared moves every participant's avatar when one person walks.
Collider is the shape physics actually uses — box, sphere, cylinder, capsule, plane, or
auto to work it out from the geometry.
Initial velocity is a starting push, applied once when the body is created rather than continuously.
Physics state is read-only: the engine writes how fast the object is going and whether it has come to rest, so a script can read them.
How these fit together is in Physics.
Tags
Little labels a plugin or a script leaves on objects it created, so it can find its own work later. The editor does not show them. If you generate scenes from code, this is where to mark what belongs to you.
Next: Materials — how surfaces look.