Tutorial Your First Scene

← Home · Solarxy Web

Tutorial: Your First Scene

Ten minutes in Solarxy Web, from an empty canvas to a lit, textured object you have exported. Nothing to install; everything stays on your machine.

This covers the same ground as the in-app tour (Help → Take the Tour), then goes a little further. If a term is unfamiliar, every node documents itself: select it and press I.

1. The shape of the app

Open solarxy.koljam.com in Chrome or Edge and press Launch app.

• Left: the viewport. Your scene, rendered on the GPU. Orbit with the left mouse button, pan with the middle, zoom with the wheel.
• Right: the node canvas. Solarxy is parametric - this graph is the scene. Nothing you build is baked; change a value upstream and everything downstream recooks.
• Below it: Properties. The selected node's parameters. Hover any parameter for its documentation.

Every panel is dockable. Drag them where you like; Desks saves an arrangement.

2. Make some geometry

1. Press Tab over the node canvas. The palette opens at your cursor - type to search, arrows to move, Enter to add. Add a Geo container.
2. Double-click the geo node to dive inside it. This is a geometry network; the breadcrumb at the top shows where you are.
3. Press Tab again and add a Box. It appears at your cursor, cooks, and shows up in the viewport.
4. In Properties, drag the Width value left and right. The viewport follows live. Hold Ctrl while dragging to snap.

Add a Transform node, then drag a wire from the box's output to its input. Move, rotate, and scale live on the transform, not baked into the box - that is the whole idea. The Q W E R keys switch the viewport tools (select, move, rotate, scale) and draw a gizmo on the selected object.

3. Light it

Go back up to the Scene (click Scene in the breadcrumb). Press Tab and add a Directional Light. Its color, intensity, and direction are parameters like any other. Up to eight lights participate; one of them may cast shadows (Cast Shadow on the light).

4. Give it a material

1. At the scene level, add a Material Network (matnet) and dive in.
2. Add a Principled surface. Metallic and roughness behave as in any PBR renderer; the node's I card explains each parameter.
3. Back in your geo network, add a Material node at the end of the chain, set its Mode to Reference, and point Material Path at your matnet.

For textures, add a Texture Network (texnet): generators like noise and ramp, adjustments like levels, and utilities like pack_orm cook entirely on the CPU, and a material's tex_ref node pulls the result in by path.

5. Look through a camera

Add a Camera node at the scene level. In the viewport's [ Camera ] menu, choose it: the pane now looks through your camera, and its focal length, sensor width, and projection are parameters on the node. Lock the pane to stop orbiting from moving the camera.

6. Save, review, export

• Save (Ctrl/Cmd+S) writes a .slxy file: one self-contained archive with the graph, cameras, review notes, and every imported asset embedded. Autosave also keeps a ring of recovery snapshots in the browser.
• Review (the Review menu) pins annotations directly onto geometry. They travel with the file, so a colleague opening your scene sees your notes where you left them.
• Export: drop a geo_export node anywhere in a geometry chain to write OBJ, STL, PLY, or GLB; image_export in a texture network writes PNG or JPEG. Both tap the chain without changing it.

Where to go next

• The Node Reference - all 58 node types, generated from the application itself.
• Solarxy Web - the full page on the web app, including browser requirements and how persistence works.
• Keyboard Shortcuts - or press ? in the app.