Make a playermodel out of anything you have modelled - a character you can walk around in, driven by the animations s&box already ships.

File > Make Player compiles it and writes a test scene with a floor and a player wearing it. Press Play and walk around.

Your model keeps its own shape. The built-in character's skeleton is fitted inside your model, so the animations only bend joints - a stocky robot stays stocky.

Help > Start Playermodel Tutorial walks it through in plain English, with an example robot to practise on, or start it on a model of your own.

The console names any bone whose spelling the animations did not recognise - almost always a typo, and the only place you would be told.

Transform handles in the viewport: drag arrows, rotate rings and a scale handle instead of typing three numbers. W, E and R switch between them.

Remesh reduces a dense import to a triangle budget, so a scan or a Meshy generation can finally be sculpted, rigged and compiled.

Subdivide is on the Rig bar now, where a too-coarse joint is actually found.

Marionette animates whole parts, not just bones - a door, a lever, a magazine, on the same timeline as the hand that works it.

A clip can hold several objects, each with its own skeleton: pose the hand, the weapon in it, and that weapon's bolt in one clip.

Marionette imports OBJ files split into their parts, with no .vmdl to compile first.

Import a mesh as a body. Sketch stage → Import, pick a Wavefront OBJ.

The triangles live beside the document rather than inside the .effigy text, so the file stays small.

Paint, weight paint and auto-skin then work on an imported part like any other.

FBX and GLB are refused with a remedy rather than half-parsed.

Import splits a file into its parts. Brows, lids, hair and a visor arrive separately instead of as one welded lump.

Each part is named after whatever the exporter called it, so you can hide, re-material and weight them a piece at a time.

A file with a single object reads exactly as before: one part, named after the feature.

Citizen size reference is a button on the tool row, right-hand end. The same switch as Edit → Settings → Reference.

A hand tutorial. Help → Start Hand Tutorial: palm, a three-joint index, the other digits, sculpt, paint, then bones parented so a finger curls.

Parent bones to each other. Right-click a bone in the Rig tree → Parent to. Hang trigger and mag off root and they follow it in Marionette.

Named variables. View → Variables, then type #thickness in any dimension. Change it once and everything that uses it moves.

Section view. View → Section View clips the preview through the origin so a shelled interior is visible.

Weight painting. Rig workspace → Weights → Paint Weights. Pick a bone and drag. Heat map is a texture, not vertex colour.

A first rigging tutorial. Help → Start Rigging Tutorial: post, sign, a bone from each, pose, compile.

Pose the rig in-tool. Press Pose, drag a bone, the mesh bends. Reset Pose puts it back. Nothing is saved.

Make a bone from a part. Right-click a part (or press Bone from Part): it measures the long axis and pins the part to it.

Same from the feature tree — one click for every part that feature made.

The bone takes the part’s name. Select a bone first and new ones hang off it. Cubes and spheres are skipped (no long axis).

Assign a part to a bone from the Parts list. Right-click → Assign to bone. The row shows which bone it is on.

Paint Falloff and an Erase button on the paint bar. Ctrl still inverts for one stroke.

Hold Ctrl to erase paint. The ring turns red. Same size, strength and falloff as the brush.

Drag a box to select in a sketch. Left-to-right is fully inside; right-to-left is anything the box touches.

A sketch Mirror tool. Select geometry, arm Mirror, click the line. The copy stays symmetric.

Revolve can spin about a line you drew in the sketch, including construction lines. Move the line and the axis follows.

Revolve can spin about a line you drew in the sketch. Set Axis to "A line of the sketch" and pick the line — construction lines included, which is what the dashed centreline of a lathe profile is

The axis follows that line when you move it, so dragging the centreline moves the bore with it.

Bones from the shape of your parts. Right-click a part and pick Make a bone from this part: it measures the part and adds a bone down its longest axis, already pinned to it.

The same from the feature tree — right-click the feature that built the parts and get one bone per part it made, so a patterned row of eight fingers is one click instead of eight.

The bone takes the part's name, and a part is named after the feature that made it. Call the extrude index_finger and that is what the bone is called.

It is rolled to match the part, so the flat of the bone runs with the flat of the part and there is no arbitrary twist to undo on every one.

Select a bone first and the new ones hang off it, pointing away from it — which is also what decides which end of the part is the root, so place the palm bone before the fingers.

A part with no long axis, like a sphere or a cube, is skipped and named in the console rather than given a bone pointing nowhere in particular.

Pose the rig and watch it bend. A Pose button in the Rig panel — press it, drag a bone, and the mesh deforms with it, so a bad weight shows up as a crease instead of a number in a panel.

Reset Pose (or toggling Pose off) returns to the bind pose; nothing is saved. It is built on the same weights the export uses, so what you see is what compiles.

Assign bones from the Parts list. Right-click a part and pick Assign to bone — the same pinning the rig panel does, reachable from the body's side. An assigned part shows its bone in blue on the row.

An eraser. Hold Ctrl while you paint and the brush takes paint off instead of putting it on, back to the surface underneath.

The brush ring turns red while Ctrl is held, so you can see which one you are about to do before you press rather than after.

Erasing uses the brush you already have — the same size, strength and falloff — so a soft eraser fades out at its edge and a Constant one takes a hard bite.

An erase is a stroke like any other: one Ctrl+Z, saved into the .effigy, and still there after you edit a feature underneath it and the part rebuilds.

Ctrl is read once, when you press. Letting go halfway through does not turn the back half of the mark into paint.

Drag a box to select in a sketch. Press on empty space in the sketcher and drag: left to right takes only what is completely inside the box, right to left takes anything the box touches, the same two boxes Onshape has.

The box adds to what is already selected, so you can build a selection up out of several boxes. Clicking empty space still clears it.

A mirror tool. Select the geometry, arm Mirror, and click the line to reflect it across.

The copy is held symmetric to the original rather than just pasted, so dragging one half moves the other.

A point already sitting on the mirror line is shared rather than doubled, so a half profile drawn against the line closes into one region when it is mirrored.

The selection stays lit while a tool that uses it is armed, so Mirror and Offset are no longer aimed at something invisible.

Planes you place yourself. A Plane button beside Sketch, so "which plane?" is no longer answered only by Top, Front, Right or a face that already exists.

Build one off a global plane, off a face of a part, or off another plane, then push it along its normal with Offset and lean it over with Angle.

Drag a plane instead of typing its offset: an arrow stands on it, and everything drawn on the plane follows as it slides.

A plane built from a face rides that face -- make the part taller and the plane moves up with it.

Planes stack, so three ribs ten apart are each "ten further on" -- change the bottom one and the rest follow.

Sketch on one the way you sketch on anything else: press Sketch, click the plane.

Planes are drawn in the viewport with their names beside them, and each has an eye in the feature tree.

Paint is a texture now, not vertex colour. A stroke goes into a 1024x1024 canvas, so a bare box paints at brush resolution with no Subdivide first.

A painted part exports its own material. Compile .vmdl writes the canvas to a PNG, wraps it in a .vmat and binds it to the part.

Entering Paint on a part whose UVs will not hold paint inserts a UV Project above it automatically, and says so. It undoes with one Ctrl+Z like any feature.

A material brush. Press Material in the Paint workspace and drag on the model to lay a material onto faces instead of picking them one at a time.

The brush uses whatever is selected in the Materials browser, so you can brush one on, click another and keep going without leaving the model.

It outlines the faces it is about to take, because a material belongs to a whole face: on a coarse box a small ring still paints an entire side.

Bones can be placed inside a model, not just on its skin. Middle is the default: a click puts the joint halfway through the material under the cursor.

So a spine runs down the middle of a chest instead of down the front of it, which is where a joint has to be for the weights around it to make sense.

While placing, the run of material being measured is drawn with its thickness, so you see where the joint will land before you click.

A Y=0 toggle forces every placed joint exactly onto the mirror plane, so a chain placed with it on mirrors cleanly.

A Falloff dropdown on the sculpt bar: Smooth for a soft mound, Sharp for a hard crease, Linear for an even fade, Constant to move the whole disc at once.

Hold Ctrl while sculpting to invert the brush -- Draw carves in, Inflate deflates, Grab drags the opposite way. The ring turns red so you can see it before you click.

Sculpting hotkeys: 1-6 arm the six brushes, X mirrors, M masks, and [ and ] shrink and grow the brush.

Rebind any Effigy key. Settings has a Hotkeys section listing every key the tool registers -- click one, press the new key, and it takes effect immediately.

Rebinds live in the engine's own shortcut store, so a change here also shows up in the editor's Editor Keybinds page, and the other way round.

A UV checker view toggle, in Settings under View. Stretching and seams show on the surface instead of waiting for a paint or a bake to smudge them.

An unwrap now says what it did -- how many charts, how many faces, and the texel density -- and warns when the result still will not hold a bake.

Boolean, on the Solid stage: union, subtract or intersect two bodies.

The engine's boolean has been working for a while, but it could only be reached by drawing a profile or drilling a hole - there was no way to point at two solids you already had and make them one.

Pick the tool body, pick the operation from the button's dropdown, and the tool is consumed by the cut. Keep tool bodies leaves it if you want to reuse it.

A Boolean refuses rather than guesses. A body cannot be its own tool, an unpicked tool is an error instead of quietly meaning "every body", and a subtract that removes everything or a union of solids that never touch each say so.

Painting. Press Paint and brush colour straight onto the model.

The paint composes over whatever material the part already wears, so a dropped material still shows everywhere you did not brush.

Strokes are saved in the .effigy file and replayed whenever the model rebuilds, so paint follows the part through later edits instead of smearing.

A workspace bar across the top: CAD, Sculpt, Paint, Rig.

The part of the pipeline you are in is a control now, rather than a word written small in the corner that you had to infer it from.

Each workspace opens the panels it needs and puts the rest away - Paint brings up the material browser, Rig gives the skeleton tree the whole right-hand side.

Whatever you rearrange while you are in a workspace is what you come back to.

Rigging has its own tool bar. Add Bone, Delete, Assign Body and Mirror sit on the Bones and Bind stages like every other tool, instead of being buttons in a side panel.

Rigs are saved in the .effigy file. Bones, their bind pose, their softness and which body is pinned to which bone all survive a save and reopen.

They did not before: placing bones and reopening the part lost every one of them, silently.

A part with no rig is written exactly as it was before, byte for byte, and still opens in older builds.

Soft bones are reachable. Select a bone, tick Soft in the Rig panel, and set its stiffness, damping, weight and cone.

Soft bones draw blue in the viewport so you can see which ones are simulated.

Preview on the Rig bar runs the solver live. Gravity pulls the soft bones off their pose so you can watch them sag and settle while you tune the numbers.

Dragging a bone with the pose gizmo makes everything soft below it swing behind the drag. Rest puts them back.

A tool that cannot run yet is dimmed and says why when you hover it, instead of looking live and doing nothing.

The tool bar marks which tools will use what you have selected. Click a face and Fillet, Chamfer, Draft, Hole, Face Material, Extrude and Move Face each get a green mark down their left edge.

Bones can be scaled in Marionette. The drag mode cycles Rotate, Move and Scale, and E still flips between the first two.

The scale is one number rather than three, because that is all a Source 2 bone carries. It keys like any other channel and plays back at runtime.

Shift-click builds a selection of bones instead of replacing it, and the group gets one gizmo at its centre that moves them together.

A Handle Size slider scales the bone dots and the areas you click to grab them, so a dense hand rig can be shrunk until its fingers stop overlapping. It is remembered between sessions.

Faces of a part can be extruded. Click a face of anything on screen, press Extrude, and it pulls.

No sketch is involved and none is asked for, so it works on a part built entirely out of primitives.

Taper, Up to next, Through all, a second distance and New body all work from a face exactly as they do from a sketch profile.

A plain pull moves the face rather than growing a boss on top of it, so the part stays one clean solid you can still Shell afterwards.

Move Face, a new tool on the Detail stage.

Offset pushes each picked face along its own normal, so picking both sides of a wall makes it thicker or thinner.

Translate moves them together, so the wall slides and keeps its thickness - material added on one side and taken from the other.

The distance can be dragged instead of typed. Open Extrude or Move Face, pick the faces, and a set of arrows appears on them.

The arrows are turned to the face rather than to the world, so the blue one is always straight out of it.

Pull it and the solid grows under the cursor, with the number in the panel counting up as it goes.

Dragging only ever sets the open tool’s distance. It never adds a feature behind your back, and the arrows are gone the moment the tool is closed.

The Profiles box in the Extrude panel picks faces. Hover one, click it, and that is your profile; click it again to take it off.

Sketch regions are still pickable in the same box at the same time, and a sketch in front of a face gets the click.

Right-click a face and every tool that can use it is on the menu: Sketch, Fillet, Chamfer, Shell, Draft, Hole, Subdivide and Face Material.

Each of them opens already pointed at the face you clicked.

Moving a face refuses rather than guesses. A face that is not flat, a face moving while a flat neighbour stays put, or a move far enough to turn the part inside out each say which it was and what to do instead.

A grid switch and a spacing dropdown at the right-hand end of the sketch tool row, shown while a sketch is open.

They are the same two values as Edit → Settings, not a second copy — change one and the other follows.

View → Console docks the editor's own console inside Effigy, along the bottom.

It is the real console — level filters, term filter, stack traces and command entry — so compile failures show up without leaving the part you are working on.

Select first, then pick the tool. Click a face or a part in the viewport and the next feature you add starts already pointed at it.

A face selection also tells the tool which part you meant, so filleting the thing you just clicked no longer rounds every part in the studio.

Fillet and chamfer can round the edges you pick, not just every sharp edge on the part. Click near an edge to add it, click again to drop it.

Picked edges are stored on the part, so they survive a save and a rebuild.

Viewport lighting. Full bright is the default so faces stay readable while you model (Edit → Settings → Full bright); turn it off for a studio sun that matches a game scene.

View → Add Point Light drops a lamp you can drag, and Delete removes the selected one. Lamps are viewport-only and never export.

Double-clicking a .effigy file in the asset browser opens it in Effigy.

Soft bones: stiffness, damping, weight and a cone per bone, turning an animated pose into one with lag and swing in it.

Games can run the soft-bone solver at runtime, not just the editor.

Animation clips bake into the compiled model, so what Effigy makes can be handed to AnimGraph. Add them through File → Animation Clips…

Bones match by name, and a mismatch is reported rather than silently dropping the clip.

Copy and paste poses in Marionette. The clipboard outlives the clip, so you can copy idle's rest pose and paste it into fire.

RigAnimPlayerComponent plays a .riganim on the character you already have, with no model compile. NormalizedTime is a 0..1 clock to tween a door or a lever against.

Grease-pencil notes drawn over a part and saved with the document. They are never exported — not to OBJ, DMX or the compiled vmdl.

Two editor tools in one package: Effigy models and rigs, Marionette animates.

Effigy is parametric CAD — sketch on a plane or a face, then extrude, revolve, sweep, loft, shell, bevel, mirror, pattern or subdivide.

Booleans cut for real, through s&box's own PolygonMesh.

The sketcher does lines, arcs, circles, ellipses and splines. Closed regions are found for you; trim, extend, fillet and offset edit in place.

Seventeen constraint kinds, properly solved — an under-constrained sketch tells you what is loose instead of misbehaving.

An ordered feature history with rollback. Change a dimension near the bottom and everything above it rebuilds.

Rig in the same tool: a skeleton, auto-weighting, and a real skinned .vmdl. Sculpt and normal-bake are included.

Marionette: click a bone, drag to rotate, key it, move on. The skeleton draws x-ray so buried bones stay clickable.

One timeline lane per bone with the real curve drawn between keys, three easing modes, and undo where one drag is one step.

Two-bone IK with rotation limits — drag a hand and the elbow and shoulder follow without bending backwards.

Clips save as .riganim and rigs as .ctrlrig, so several clips can share one rig.