# The three modes

Build, Compose, and Visualize are the three states a scene can sit in. Each one owns a different part of the pipeline you'd recognize from a real production – art department, camera department, post – and the controls reshape themselves when you switch.

## Why are there three modes?

Most 3D tools collapse world-building, shot composition, and rendering into one workspace with a hundred panels. That's fine if you've got a Houdini license and three months. Less fine when your director needs to see the shot tomorrow. The split into three modes maps to how a creative team already moves: an art-department phase that builds the set, a cinematography phase that blocks the shots, and a render pass at the end.

The split is also what lets the AI behave. Each mode hands the visualizer a different kind of context – Build supplies the semantic 3D scene, Compose supplies the camera and lens, Visualize supplies the prompt and the model. Keep the modes separate and the prompt that reaches the model stays specific. Mash them together and the model has to guess what you meant, which is when you start getting the wrong cop car in the back of every render.

## What it looks like in the product

The mode switcher sits at the top center of the workspace, between the project title on the left and the credit counter on the right. Three icons; the one for the mode you're in is highlighted in green.

![Build mode active in the editor with the mode switcher in the top toolbar showing the three available modes (Build highlighted, Visualize available)](/files/KgYtIciMSkOvMMvTyxAN)

When you switch, three things change at once: the contextual menus that open when you click an object, the camera control behavior, and the right-side panel. The viewport itself stays put – your scene doesn't reload, your cameras don't reset, your selection holds.

## How it connects to the rest

* **Build mode is the art department.** The asset library is here, AI Composer is here, image references attach to objects here. Smart Import, populators, sets, and Generate 3D Asset are all Build-mode features. Sun position, fog, terrain – all Build.
* **Compose mode is the camera department.** Add a shot, place its camera, set the lens, frame the action. Animation lives here too, and the part that catches people: animated movement is bound to a shot, not to the scene. Move an object in Compose mode and the move only applies to the active shot. Move it in Build mode and the move applies everywhere. The webinar pirate-scene walkthrough leans on this hard – set the shot first, then move things into place, otherwise the animation has nowhere to go.
* **Visualize mode is post.** Pick a model, edit the auto-prompt if you want to, generate. Image edits (the pencil tool), first-and-last-frame video interpolation, and the style and lighting presets all live here.

The flow is intended to be linear – Build → Compose → Visualize – but you'll jump back constantly. A render that looks wrong is more often fixed by adding an image reference on an object back in Build than by re-prompting in Visualize. Bad framing fixes itself in Compose, not in the prompt.

## When to reach for it

The signal is the noun in your head. *"I need a chair"* or *"the building should be glass"* is Build. *"From this angle, with a 35mm"* is Compose. *"Render it cinematic, golden hour"* is Visualize. If you find yourself in the wrong mode for the noun, the contextual menus will feel slightly off – that's the cue to switch.

One sequencing rule worth knowing: animation only commits to a shot. If you start moving an object in Build mode expecting it to animate, nothing will happen at render time. Make the shot first, then move the object inside it. The short version: shots are containers for time, scenes are containers for space.

## Related

* [Build mode overview](/build/build.md)
* [Compose mode overview](/compose/compose.md)
* [Visualize mode overview](/visualize/visualize.md)
* [How the visualizer thinks](/overview/concepts/how-the-visualizer-thinks.md)
* [Animation and shot time](/overview/concepts/animation-and-shot-time.md)


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