Studio basics: your first scene

Everything’s installed, Studio opens, and you’re staring at an empty grid. This walks you from nothing to a saved scene using the standard buttons, in the order you actually meet them. For the full set of hidden keyboard shortcuts, keep the shortcuts cheatsheet open alongside this.

The layout

Two things run the whole show:

The left toolbar with its tabs: Add (spawn things), Anim (pose and animate), Scene (save and load), and System (settings, screenshots).
The Workspace window: a tree of everything in your scene. This is how you select, rename, group and delete objects. If it’s not open, turn it on from the toolbar.

[Image: the Studio interface with the toolbar and Workspace labelled]

1. Add a character

Click Add → Female (or Male), and pick a character card from the list. It drops into the scene at the origin and appears in the Workspace tree.

Add is also where Item (props, furniture, effects), Light, Camera, and the Map background live. Everything you put in a scene starts here.

2. Select and move things

Click an object in the Workspace tree, or click it directly in the viewport. A gizmo (a set of coloured arrows) appears on the selected object. The three transform modes are the same keys as Blender:

W move
E rotate
R scale

Drag a coloured axis handle to move along just that axis, or the centre to move freely. Ctrl+Z undoes anything you get wrong.

3. Move the camera

Drag in the viewport to orbit, and use the scroll wheel to move in and out. Two shortcuts do most of the work: F snaps the camera to look straight at whatever you’ve selected, and the arrow and numpad keys fly the camera around. The full camera control set is in the shortcuts guide.

You can save camera angles to the number keys and jump back to them with 0–9, which is how you line up the same shot again later.

4. Pose the character

With the character selected, open the Anim tab. From here you can:

Drop a ready-made pose or animation onto them.
Hand-pose limbs with the IK and FK handles for full control.
Set the expression and where the eyes look.

For finer facial control than the built-in expressions, see how to use blend shapes.

5. Dress the set

Back in Add, drop in a Map for the background, then Items for props and furniture, and Lights to shape the scene. Select each one and place it with the same W / E / R gizmo.

Once a scene has more than a handful of objects, make folders in the Workspace tree and drag related things into them. It keeps the list readable and lets you move a whole group at once.

For proper lighting control (real shadows, colour, volumetric shafts), the Graphics plugin lighting guide covers every slider.

6. Save your scene

Open the Scene tab and click Save. Your whole scene, characters, poses, items, lights and camera, is written to one file you can reopen any time. Get in the habit of saving often: Ctrl+S saves without opening the menu.

That’s the core loop: Add → pose → light → Scene/Save. Everything else in Studio is a refinement on top of it. When something doesn’t look right, the troubleshooting guides cover the usual snags.