Collapse a whole scene into one reusable asset — and stage a street

Design once, place many

You've spent an afternoon on a house — walls, roof, windows, cladding, the works. Now you want three of them down a street, each a slightly different design. Rebuilding from scratch each time is madness, and keeping four full editable models in one project bogs everything down.

zdraw's My Assets library solves this. Collapse a finished scene into a single lightweight asset, save it, and drop it back into any project as a movable block. Build a catalogue of house designs, then stage them.

Collapse scene → Save

Open the Library panel and expand 🧊 My Assets. Click Collapse scene → Save, give it a name, and zdraw merges everything visible — walls, slabs, fixtures, stairs, roofs, furniture — into one GLB and stores it with a thumbnail. Construction helpers (the grid, boolean cutters, gizmos, ghost floors) are left out automatically.

The saved asset keeps its materials — walls, glass, roof and timber all stay distinct — so it comes back looking exactly like it left.

Your library lives in your browser

Assets are stored locally (IndexedDB), so they survive reloads and follow you between projects without any upload. Each asset gets Download .glb for portability — move it to another machine, hand it to a colleague, or open it in another 3D tool — and there's an Import .glb button to bring external models in as assets too.

Place it back — and stage

Hit Place and the asset drops into your scene as a standard movable object. Rotate it, nudge it, duplicate it. Place the same house five times down a road; mix in two other designs from your library. Repeated placements cascade slightly so they don't land exactly on top of each other.

Because placed assets ride the normal object pipeline, they save straight into your .zdraw project — a staged street round-trips like any other scene.

Keep them light

Here's the honest part. A fully-furnished house is *heavy* — not because of textures, but because of geometry. Detailed furniture models carry millions of triangles, and browsers can't compress that on export the way a dedicated pipeline can.

Two controls keep staging assets manageable:

or keep them Full. Lower is dramatically smaller and, for something viewed from across a street, indistinguishable.

of the size, and when you're staging a streetscape you're looking at façades anyway. Leave it on only when the interior will be seen.

• Texture quality — cap embedded textures at 512 / 1024 / 2048 px,
• Furniture — off by default. An exterior-only shell is a fraction

For staging, Furniture off + 512 px is the sweet spot. Reuse the same asset where houses repeat rather than saving near-identical copies.

Clean thumbnails

Each asset's thumbnail is rendered at a narrow 10° field of view on a white background — a near-orthographic, distortion-free portrait of the model that reads clearly at library-tile size.

Next steps

Build a few house variants, collapse each one, and line them up. Open the tutorial for the full workflow or the gallery for scenes to remix into your first assets.