#Your First Sphere

At this point, you should have renda.studio open in your browser. When you start Studio for the first time, you will be greeted with its splash screen, which you can dismiss by either clicking the New Project button or by clicking outside of the splash screen.

#Studio Windows

First, let's take a quick glance at how windows work. Renda Studio is divided into several windows. Each window has an icon in the top left corner. And you can recognize what type of window something is by its icon.

If the icon seems a bit mysterious to you, you can also hover over it with your mouse and get a tooltip that tells you the name of the window type.

#Creating an Entity

Entities are the main building block of a scene. In fact, Renda doesn't even have a concept of scenes, scenes are also an entity. So let's first create an entity that will serve as our scene.

You can do this in the Project Window which can be found at the bottom left of the screen. This window contains all the assets for your current project. But at the moment it is pretty empty, let's do something about that!

Click the + button in the Project Window.
Choose New Entity from the context menu.
Optionally give your created asset a name with the Enter or F2 key.

Great, you have created your first asset!

Note: As you may have noticed, this asset has the .json extension. Many assets in Renda are basic JSON files with a very simple structure. This makes it very easy to modify files with a text editor if you ever need to.

#Opening the Entity

Now let's double-click the newly created asset. This will open the entity so that you can make changes to it. When doing this, your entity appears inside the Outliner Window at the top left.

The outliner window shows the tree structure of the entity that is currently open. But since this entity was just created, it only contains a single entry right now.

Go ahead and add a couple of children to this entity. You can do so by clicking the + button at the top of the Outliner Window.

Alright great, you should have a bunch of entities now. Let's try to link a sphere asset to one of them.

#Creating a Sphere Mesh

But before you can link a mesh, you'll need to create it first! Since you already know how to create an entity, this should sound familiar:

Go to the Project Window in the bottom left.
Click the + button.
Choose New Mesh.

This creates a mesh asset that you can now link to an entity.

#Linking the Sphere Mesh

You may have noticed that if you change your selection, the content of the Properties Window changes with it. The properties window, located at the top right, allows you to view and modify the properties of the selected item.

To link your sphere asset, you first need to add a new mesh component to an entity:

Click one of your entities in the Outliner Window.
Inside the Properties Window, click + in the Components section.
From the context menu, choose Mesh.
Drag your mesh asset from the previous section to the droppable area next to Mesh inside the mesh component.

Awesome! You should now faintly see a sphere in the center of the scene.

#Let There Be Light

The sphere is a bit dark, however, and the only reason why we can see it, is because it obscures the grid. So let's add some lights to the scene as well.

Select another entity in your outliner. If you need more entities, just click the + button again.
Just like before, go to the Properties Window and click the + button in the Components section.
This time we'll add a light component by clicking Light from the context menu.

This adds a light source to the scene, but it is currently positioned right inside the sphere, so it has no effect. You'll have to move the light a bit so that it is located outside the sphere.

You can move entities by dragging the white circle that is positioned at the location of the selected entity. Simply grab the white circle around the light icon and move it outside of the sphere.

#Conclusion

And that's it! You should now have a visible sphere inside your scene. If you like, go ahead and save your changes by clicking the Save button in the Entity Editor Window, otherwise, the entity asset will be empty again the next time you open it.

We rushed a bit through a lot of different topics in this chapter. Otherwise, it would have taken a long time for you to get something exciting on your screen. We'll cover all the mentioned topics again in more detail later in this manual. But hopefully, this gives you an idea about the basics of Renda Studio.