What an object is made of
Select an object and the right-hand panel shows what it is made of. This panel is where you decide what an object does — there is no object type to pick, only components to add.
The header
| Icon | Does |
|---|---|
| Duplicate | clone the object and everything inside it |
| Lock | stop it being edited on the canvas |
| Delete | remove it from the scene |
| Show / hide | toggle visibility |
Large background objects (a floor, a backdrop) are the things you click by accident all day. Locking them means your marquee selections and drags stop catching them.
What you can add
+ New component lists everything available:
| Component | Gives the object |
|---|---|
| Transform | position, rotation, scale — always present, cannot be removed |
| Geometry | a primitive shape, or an imported model |
| — 3D animation | skeletal animation from an imported model |
| — 3D scan | a Gaussian splat capture |
| Material | how surfaces look → Material editor |
| Text | a text label |
| Video | video, as a surface or texture |
| Audio | sound |
| Light | a light source |
| Look at | turn to face a point or an object |
| Shadow | whether it casts and receives shadows |
| Script | behaviour written in code |
| Patch | behaviour built as a node graph |
| UI | an interface card → UI Editor |
| Events | triggers and actions → Events editor |
| States | named snapshots of this object's settings |
| Animation | timeline presets → Animation Controller |
Some components are created for you and never appear in the menu: the object's name and visibility, its place in the hierarchy, the skeleton and blend shapes of an imported model, a scene's trigger, and a scene's patch graph.
Transform
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Position | in your project's units |
| Rotation | in degrees |
| Scale | a multiplier; axes can be linked so they scale together |
| Lock | stops canvas editing, same as the header icon |
Add a Look at component and the rotation fields go inactive — that component owns the rotation now. Remove it to get manual control back.
Geometry
A primitive (box, sphere, cylinder, capsule, cone, plane and the rest) or a reference to a model you imported. Each shape has its own dimensions and segment counts.
Segment counts are worth understanding: they control how smooth a curved shape looks and how much it costs to draw. A sphere at 32 segments looks round; at 8 it is a faceted ball; at 128 it is round and expensive for no visible gain.
Text, video, audio
Text has its own font, size, alignment and colour. Size is in pixels, where 1000 px is one metre in the world.
Video plays onto the object. It starts muted, because browsers refuse to autoplay video with sound.
Audio plays a sound, positioned in space by default so it gets louder as you approach.
Playing it again cuts off the first one, so it is wrong for footsteps or gunfire. Those belong in a script, where each call starts its own sound.
Light and shadow
Five light types, each with a colour and intensity. You aim a light by rotating the object — there is no target field to fill in.
Shadow decides whether an object casts and receives them. Shadows are the expensive part of lighting, so switch casting on for the one or two lights that matter rather than all of them.
Which type suits what: Lights.
States
A state is a named snapshot of this object's settings — position, colour, visibility, anything. Add states here, then switch between them from an event.
This is how you build a switch, a highlight, or a door that is open or closed, without animating anything by hand.
Change the object with a state active and you are editing that state's snapshot, not the object. This is exactly right when building states and thoroughly confusing when you did not realise one was selected.
Script and patch
Both point at a file in your project assets. A script is code; a patch is a node graph. Either can expose its own settings in this panel, which is what makes one script reusable across many objects with different values.
Next: Material editor