What you'll learn in this track

Before you can start building a 3D dollhouse model, you need clean, well-positioned panorama images captured at each camera station inside the property. Tutorial 01 covers the image capturing workflow — how to position your 360° camera correctly in each room, maintain a consistent height across all shots, and name your files in a way the AI Align Tool can process efficiently.

Tutorial 02 covers the AI Align Tool itself. This Windows application takes your raw equirectangular panoramas and automatically detects where the floor boundary sits in each image. Getting this alignment right is critical — an incorrectly placed floor line will cause your Blender floor plane to sit at the wrong height, meaning all your wall extrusions will be off further down the workflow. The tool lets you preview each detection result before saving, and outputs alignment data that the MetaRoom3D Editor plugin reads when you import the panorama into Blender.

What you'll learn in this track

Tutorial 01 walks you through installing Blender 4.5.2 LTS and the MetaRoom3D Editor plugin. The plugin installs via Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Install from Disk — point it at the downloaded .zip file and it appears as MetaRoom3D Editor v2.0.1 in the N panel on the right side of Blender's 3D viewport. Before importing any panorama, set your viewport shading to Rendered mode — this is the most common beginner mistake and will prevent you from seeing the panorama texture correctly if skipped.

Tutorial 02 covers the complete 3D dollhouse modeling workflow from a single panorama:

1. Add Pano Camera — imports your panorama as a sphere-projected image with a virtual camera placed at the centre of the room.
2. Floor alignment — switch to top-down (Z axis) view, select the floor plane edges, and use the Move Tool to match the floor boundaries visible in the panorama.
3. Panorama Rotation — use the Z Rotation slider in the MetaRoom3D panel to rotate the image until walls run parallel with the X/Y grid axes. Hold Shift for fine-grained adjustments.
4. Wall extrusion — select all floor edges in Edit Mode, press E to extrude, press Esc immediately, then move the new edges up the Z axis to ceiling height.
5. Connect Backface — makes the inner faces of the walls visible so you can see inside the room model.
6. Door openings — use Ctrl+R to add edge loops at door positions, switch to face select mode, and delete the door face polygons.
7. Unwrap and Bake — project the panorama texture correctly onto the 3D geometry surfaces.
8. Export as .glb — File > Export > gLTF 2.0, named floor1.glb or floor2.glb, ready for the Hotspot Editor.

What you'll learn in this track

Once you have your exported .glb floor files from Track 2, the Hotspot Editor is what transforms them into a fully navigable virtual tour. The app has two main areas: a left sidebar containing all project controls, and a main viewport that displays a live equirectangular panorama you can look around in real time.

To start a new project, click Choose Files under the Select Folder section and load all your panorama images at once. They appear as thumbnail previews in the sidebar for quick switching. If you are continuing a previous session, use Import Configuration at the top of the sidebar to load a saved hotspot-config.js file — this restores all your previously created hotspot connections automatically without any re-work.

Adding a hotspot between two rooms is a two-step process. First, select the source panorama (e.g. Living Room) and right-click in the viewer at the spot where you want the navigation arrow to appear — typically in front of a doorway. A blue dot marks the placement and can be freely dragged to reposition. Then, in the Edit Hotspot panel, use the Linked Panorama dropdown to choose the destination room (e.g. Front Door). The viewer automatically switches to the destination panorama so you can immediately add the return hotspot pointing back — creating a two-way connection between rooms.