Your first project
We will make a marker-based AR scene: point a phone at a picture, and a 3D object appears with a sound when you tap it. Everything here generalises to bigger projects.
1. Create the project
Sign in at arclip.design and create a project. You land in Studio with an empty space and one scene.
2. Choose what makes the scene appear
Open Scenes in the left rail, select your scene, and set its trigger:
| Trigger | Appears when |
|---|---|
| 3D | straight away — no AR, good for testing |
| Image | the camera sees a picture you upload |
| QR | a QR code is scanned |
| Surface | the visitor places it on a floor or table |
| Face | a face is detected |
| 360 | a panoramic environment opens |
Pick Image and upload the picture you will print or show on another screen. Set its real physical width — this is how the engine knows what scale your content should be.
A photograph tracks well. A flat logo on white does not: there is nothing for the camera to lock onto. High contrast and irregular detail are what matter, not resolution.
3. Add something to see
Open Layers and assets and drag a model onto the canvas — or use the + button in the top bar to add a primitive.
Move, rotate and scale it with the toolbar that appears next to the selection. The grid is in your project's units, so a one-metre cube really is a metre against the marker.
4. Give it a material
With the object selected, find Material in the right-hand panel and press Edit.
Standard is the right default: set a colour, then roughness. Roughness is the setting that
does the most work — high for cloth and stone, low for polished metal.
5. Make it react
Still with the object selected, add an Events component, then add an event:
- Trigger: on click
- Step: play sound — pick an audio file
- Step: transformation animation — move it up 0.2 m over 400 ms
That is a complete interaction, with no code.
The editor draws your scene but deliberately does not execute logic — otherwise animations would fight you while you work. Press Preview to try it.
6. Preview
Preview opens your experience as a visitor sees it. Test the tap, the sound, the animation.
For a marker scene, preview on a phone and point it at the printed picture — desktop preview cannot show you whether tracking holds at an angle, which is what usually needs adjusting.
7. Publish
Publish in the top bar turns your project into a link anyone can open. You get a preset address, and you can connect a custom domain in project settings.
Re-publish after any change — visitors see the last published version, not your working copy.
Where to go from here
| You want to… | Read |
|---|---|
| Know what every panel does | Interface tour |
| Organise a bigger project | Scenes and spaces |
| Choreograph movement | Animation Controller |
| Build logic with values and conditions | Patch Editor |
| Add buttons and a score display | UI Editor |
| Understand how the engine behaves | Creators Engine |
Next: Interface tour