Set up a Basic 3D Scene (Camera & Environment)

Before you can customize lighting or backgrounds, you need a minimal 3D setup — just enough to make your scene visible. In 3dverse, most of this setup is already handled for you.

Minimum Setup

To make your scene visible and correctly lit, you only need:

1. Camera – defines what part of the scene you can see
2. Environment – defines the background and provides ambient light
3. (Optional) Sun – adds direct light and shadows

Camera

In the general settings of your 3dverse scene, it includes a default camera setting. When a user joins the scene, a camera entity is automatically created for them using these defaults camera settings. You can then adjust your user camera’s settings to control your view and environment.

You can access your camera settings:

1. By clicking the camera icon in the canvas toolbar

2. Or by selecting your camera entity directly into the scene graph to view and edit the camera component's properties in the Components panel.

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If you want all users to have the same camera settings as you, you need to save them in the scene’s default camera settings. Easiest way is to click on

Take a snapshot

in the canvas. Or you can do it manually in the Settings of the scene.

Environment

The environment defines the world around your objects, it’s both your background and your ambient lighting source. Even if you don’t add explicit lights, an environment provides enough illumination for your objects to be visible. There are three main types of environments:

1. Gradient - a smooth color background (simple and light)
2. Skybox (Cubemap) - a 360° image surrounding your scene (realistic background)
3. Atmosphere - Atmosphere – a physically-based sky simulation that reacts to the sun

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Important: Only one environment type should be selected on the camera.

1. Gradient

The color gradient background is the simplest environment setting. To set the gradient colors, you can modify the Spherical Gradient Top and the Spherical Gradient Bottom in Scene Settings → Environment.

You’ll notice a Solid Color option — it’s only used if you uncheck Display Background in your camera settings. You’ll need to create a new session to see the solid color change take effect.

2. Skybox (Cubemap)

You might have encountered the concept of skybox in video games before. It is often used to make a game level appear larger than it really is by enclosing the level in a cube, with each side of the cube capturing a view of a distant looking environment (like mountains, or a faraway city). It will also impact the Ambient Effect (color tone, brightness and softness of global lighting, realism of reflections on metallic or glossy materials)

A cubemap is an asset which assembles 6 textures that you can imagine as the faces of a cube. These three cubemaps will work together to emulate an environment. The skybox cubemap contains the color information, and the radiance and irradiance contain light direction and brightness information, which will help light up what’s inside our skybox. In 3dverse, we use the component 'Environment' to use cubemaps.

If you want to use your own skybox, you need to first upload a hdr file. A hdr file will convert to three cubemaps which correspond to skybox, radiance and irradiance cubemaps.

For the example, you will use a pre-defined 3dverse skybox.

First, You can add a skybox to your scene by clicking then Environment

Click on '+' icon on top right of the scene graph and select environment.

Then, activate the skybox to your camera:

Activate the skybox and see the difference.

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If you want to reset your camera with the default camera settings of your scene

Click on 'Reset to default settings'.

3. Atmosphere

The atmosphere feature aims to simulate the scattering of light in the atmosphere to produce realistic sky and horizon colors. It is particularly useful for creating a dynamic and physically-based sky background. The sun entity interacts with the atmosphere so you can simulate night, sun rise and sun set by changing the orientation of the sun.

To have an atmosphere environment, enable Atmosphere in your camera settings and make sure you have a sun in your scene (check the Sun section below).

Activate the atmosphere and see the difference. Don't forget to add a Sun before.

Sun

A sun is a directional light that can make your scene look more natural and lifelike, especially if you want to simulate daylight. If you want to give your scene a sunlit feel without diving deep into complex settings, it's a quick way to enhance the overall look.

You can add a sun to your scene by clicking then Sun. A sun has a light component with isSun enabled. You can change the sun color and intensity. Play with its orientation and see how that changes the lighting and shadows of your scene.

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We’ve created a few handy widgets that let you access the camera and render graph settings directly in your app — useful for debugging, testing, or quick adjustments.

Render Graph Settings Sample

A widget that displays all settings of a given render graph.

You can also add a widget to control the sun directly from your web app.

Sun Position Picker Sample

A widget that lets you modify the sun position.

Related resources

Setting up an environment in the Scene Editor

This tutorial will quickly walk you through some basic actions to set up your environment for your 3D scene.