User Guide

Scene Explorer

The tree lists the public scene, camera, lights, meshes and transform hierarchy, materials, material textures, and animation groups. Select an item to inspect it.

• Use Search to filter by label.
• Use arrow keys to move through and expand the tree.
• Enable Pick to select a mesh by clicking the canvas. Camera drags are ignored.
• Selection actions appear between the panes and status bar when supported.
• Delete meshes from the selected-entity bar or the red row action. Set confirmEntityRemoval: true to ask before deletion; the default is false. Transform node, light, and camera deletion waits for an official Babylon Lite public removal API for those entity types.

The Scene Explorer footer links to the User Guide, BabylonPress, and the project repository.

Properties

Editable controls are shown only for verified public writes. Changes are applied to the scene and then read back through the adapter.

Properties for the selected scene, camera, mesh, transform, light, material, texture, or animation group refresh when the application changes that object outside Explorer.

When animation groups exist, the lowest Properties footer displays their count. Select Animation Groups N to open Scene Explorer, clear its filter, expand the relevant branch, select Animation Groups, and scroll it into view.

Scene

Clear color, image-processing exposure and contrast, tone mapping, metadata, environment primary color, and environment Y rotation. Babylon Lite 1.17.0 exposes setSceneImageProcessing() updates for exposure, contrast, tone-mapping enabled state, and the Standard/ACES/Khronos PBR Neutral tone-mapping algorithm. The earlier 1.11.0 audit found an algorithm-only cache limitation; it still needs a browser rendering regression test against 1.17.0.

Materials

PBR factors and environment intensity; Standard colors, alpha, specular power, and texture levels. The displayed family is inferred from public fields.

Mesh deformation

The Deformation section shows Skinned: Yes/No, Bone count, Morph targets: Yes/No, Morph target count, and Current weights. Morph weights refresh while that mesh is selected. Bone animation can deform a mesh without changing its own position, rotation, or scaling.

Geometry and picking diagnostics

Selected meshes show cached CPU vertex, index, triangle-list, normal, UV, tangent, and color counts from getMeshGeometry(). Successful canvas picks add a read-only Last Pick section with point, distance, normals, face/submesh IDs, barycentric coordinates, and thin-instance identity.

Registered textures

Registered texture entities can declare textureType as dynamic, html, or array. Arrays can also be detected from their public positive layers value; Dynamic and HTML textures require the explicit hint.

Copying

The copy button beside a row copies that value. The selection Copy action exports a safe public-property snapshot of the selected entity.

Tools

Upload GLB

Loads a self-contained local .glb through Babylon Lite and adds its asset container to the current scene.

Export Scene

Downloads a JSON inspection snapshot containing the public values visible to the Explorer. It is not a .babylon or GLB file and is not intended to reconstruct the scene.

Status bar statistics

FPS and Frame interval are calculated from the average time between browser requestAnimationFrame callbacks, sampled over 500 ms. They reflect display refresh and VSync as well as application load; neither is CPU or GPU render duration. For example, 6.9 ms is approximately 145 FPS.

GPU appears separately only when Babylon Lite GPU timing is enabled and reports a positive measurement. Explorer does not enable GPU timing automatically. Draw, mesh, and light values come from the current engine and scene.

Layouts and themes

Single stacks Scene Explorer above the right-side Properties/Tools tabs. Drag the divider to resize the panes. Split docks the tree at the left and Properties/Tools at the right, leaving the canvas interactive between them.

Dark and light themes, the selected layout, and the Single divider position are stored locally in the browser.

Keyboard shortcuts

Current limitations

• Environment textures cannot be discovered because the public scene has no texture collection or environment-texture field.
• Original texture URLs and preview pixels are not retained through the current public texture API.
• Material families are identified through Babylon Lite 1.17.0's public family API, with structural fallbacks for custom material-like objects.
• Export Scene is a diagnostic JSON snapshot because Babylon Lite exposes no public scene serializer.
• A custom adapter currently replaces the default adapter; future composition will allow additional application-owned entities.