Tutorial: six ways in
The modeller's tutorial is six cases instead of one tour. The six starting points ask for different things, and a single linear walkthrough would teach only what they have in common.
Each case lives at models.pleion.dev/learn/modeler, where it comes with an account and a cabinet to keep the result in. Below is what each one is for, so you can start with the one that matches what is on your disk.
The six #
| Case | You start with | You end with | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · A prop from a scan | An STL in millimetres, non-manifold, no materials | A clean, welded, textured GLB | Import options, the readiness checks, cleanup that says what it did |
| 2 · A vase from a profile | Nothing | A lathed, modified, exported mesh | Parametric shapes, the modifier stack, mesh editing |
| 3 · A lit corner | Two objects and a flat grey render | A lit, shadowed, graded frame | Scene mode: lights, shadow requests, environment, post |
| 4 · A character from a bare mesh | An unrigged humanoid | A skinned, weighted, posed character | Auto-rig, weight painting, posing, the readiness a skin needs |
| 5 · Borrowing a walk | A rig and somebody else's clip | Your character walking | Retarget: auto-mapping, foot locking, what a bone map is |
| 6 · An agent beside you | A project and an MCP connection | The same project, edited by both of you | The tool table, the shared history, the recovery journal |
Every case is a test #
Each case ships a .jsonl journal of the exact commands its scenario ran, and the repository replays that journal from an empty project on every CI run. When a case says "extrude the rim and the readiness check goes quiet", the replay checks that sentence. It rebuilds the document command by command and compares the result with the committed project, the committed GLB and the committed picture.
So a case that has gone stale fails a test before it can mislead a reader. For the same reason the pictures on those pages are drawn by the functions the editor draws with, not screenshotted by hand: when a panel moves, the picture moves with it, and a picture that no longer matches fails a check.
Where the gaps are written down #
doc/modeler-tutorial-gaps.md in the repository is a journal of everything found while writing the cases, meaning every place where the text wanted something the code could not do. Each row is a gap, its type, and the plan row that closed it.
Read it if you are deciding whether to trust the tool. It lists things that were wrong and have been fixed: an agent that could not choose a unit on import, readiness checks that skipped imported geometry, a joint bend with nothing equivalent at the document level, a recovery journal that wrote two inert lines for a recipe that did nothing.
Starting #
If what you want is a scene in code, the engine's quickstart is the shorter path. The modeller is for when what you have is a file somebody sent you.