Cympha Studio essentials — find your way around your first time

This first tour of Cympha Studio covers workspaces, opening scans and plans, measuring, the gallery and the case bar, the tools you use to review a dental case in Cympha.

Audience: Anyone opening Cympha Studio at studio.cympha.com for the first time — clinician, designer, or patient. No previous Cympha or 3D-software experience assumed.

You'll come away knowing: what the seven workspaces are and how to switch between them, how to open a scan or a treatment plan, how to drop a measurement, how the gallery works, and how the case bar plays a staged treatment plan back.

Time required: Around ten minutes. Studio is a browser app — there is nothing to install.

Before you start

You need:

A modern browser. Chrome, Edge, or Brave on a laptop or desktop. Studio does its heavy 3D work right in the browser; tablets and phones can open the URL but several features (folder-based project save, articulation, distance measurement) only fire on real keyboards and pointer devices.
A Cympha account (optional but recommended). Studio opens and renders with no sign-in — you can drop in a scan from your local disk and explore, rotate, step through and measure freely. Sign-in is needed for cloud actions — Create Cympha Case (covered in the related how-to), opening a case shared with you via app.cympha.com, saving back to the cloud — and for a handful of in-app actions when you use them: saving a cephalometric tracing to the gallery, the Area touchup and Remove region cleanups, and the DSD Download PNG.
Sample files to play with. Any .stl / .ply / .obj from a scanner, or a .gvw treatment plan a colleague exported from OrthoPlus, or a DICOM CBCT zip. Studio doesn't care which.

If you don't have any files handy, sign in and open a case from app.cympha.com — Studio will pull the files for you.

Step 1 — Open Studio and pick a workspace

Go to studio.cympha.com. The page loads with an empty 3D scene and a small navigation strip at the top.

At the top-left is the workspace switcher. Studio has seven workspaces:

3D Processing — optical scans, mesh viewing, registration, articulation. The default.
Orthodontics — OrthoPlus cases, tooth staging, IPR.
Ortho Monitoring — plays a treatment plan side-by-side with the patient's monitoring photos taken at each step.
Implant — CBCT loading, implant planning, .pie / .imp interop.
Facial Scan — face capture, landmark verification, CBCT alignment.
Ceph image processing — lateral X-ray landmark detection and tracing.
Digital Smile Design — single-photo smile design: detect the teeth, frame the design, generate the new smile.

What a workspace actually does. A workspace is a menu filter, not a mode switch. Same viewer, same scene — only the hamburger menu narrows down to the tools you need now. You can switch workspaces any time without losing what you've loaded.

Pick the workspace closest to the task. If you're not sure, leave it on 3D Processing — you can switch later.

Step 2 — Load a scan or a plan

Click the hamburger icon (top-left, three lines). The dropdown has two columns: Models & data and View & help. The relevant items in Models & data, depending on your workspace:

Open optical scan file… — accepts .stl, .ply, .obj. Add a texture file in the same picker if you want the scan to be coloured. Available in 3D Processing, Orthodontics, Implant, and Facial Scan workspaces.
Open DICOM… — accepts a folder of .dcm slices. Loads the volume as the primary CT. Available in 3D Processing, Implant, and Facial Scan workspaces.
Open OrthoPlus plan… — accepts a .gvw from OrthoPlus. Loads the staged tooth-position case. Available in Orthodontics and Ortho Monitoring workspaces.
Open implant project… — accepts a .pie GuideMia Implant project. Available in the Implant workspace. (Writing changes back to the .pie requires the matching DICOM loaded — Studio blocks a save against a mismatched CT.)

You can also drag-and-drop a file directly into the viewer area — Studio infers the format from the extension. When Studio is opened via a link to a file, it also picks the matching workspace automatically: a .gvw link lands in Orthodontics, a .pie in Implant, meshes in 3D Processing (.cyp and DICOM leave the workspace unchanged).

The bottom-left corner shows a load-progress bar while files parse. Big DICOM volumes take a while; a single .stl loads almost instantly.

Step 3 — Find your way around the scene

Once anything is loaded:

Left-mouse drag rotates the camera around the scene.
Right-mouse drag pans.
Scroll wheel zooms.
Double-click any object — that becomes the rotation pivot.

To reset the camera, use the hamburger menu → View & help → Reset Camera. To wipe the scene and start over, use Clear Scene.

Step 4 — Drop a distance measurement

The viewer has a left-side floating toolbar with single-purpose tools. Click the distance icon (the ruler) and then click two points on the surface. A line appears with the distance in millimetres rendered next to it.

What distance measurement is for. Communication, not clinical decisions. Each measurement automatically saves a gallery snapshot with the value as its comment (Distance: X mm) — so the number travels with the project even after the on-screen line is gone.

Step 5 — Use the gallery

The hamburger menu → Models & data → Add pictures… lets you drop intraoral photos, facial photos, retraction photos, anything .jpg / .png / .webp. They land in the gallery panel — a draggable, width-resizable floating panel on the right side of the viewer.

What you can do in the gallery panel:

Click a thumbnail to open the image full-size in an overlay.
Annotate — the simple circle-marker editor lets you draw on a snapshot and save it back to the gallery as an annotated image.
Drag the bar at the top of the panel to move the panel around the screen; drag the left edge to resize it.

If the case you're viewing has photos embedded inside the .gvw (some OrthoPlus plans do), the gallery panel automatically lists those alongside your locally-added ones.

Step 6 — Play through a staged plan with the case bar

Loading a .gvw in the Orthodontics workspace enables the case bar at the bottom of the viewer. The case bar shows:

A step slider — drag it to scrub through the staged plan from step 0 (initial) to step N (final).
A step number readout and play / pause controls for animated playback.
An upper / lower arch toggle if you only want to watch one jaw at a time.

In the Ortho Monitoring workspace, the case bar is paired with the monitoring playback panel — a side-by-side view of the plan at the current step and the patient's matching photo for that step. Scrubbing the slider plays plan + photo in lockstep. (Ortho Monitoring is the one workspace that also rearranges the layout; the other six only filter the menu.)

To get back to the original plan after experimenting, reopen the .gvw — loading it again replaces the orthodontic case layer without touching the rest of your scene.

Step 7 — Save (or share) what you've assembled

Once you've loaded scans, photos, and dropped measurements you may want to keep them as a session:

Save project as… — picks a folder and writes a .cyp project file plus a _CypFile asset folder. Reopen later with Open project…. Chrome and Edge save to a real folder; other browsers fall back to downloading a .zip.

If you want to send the scene to a lab or a colleague as a Cympha case, that's a different action — see Create a Cympha case from Studio.

Troubleshooting

The scene is empty after loading a file. Remember that workspaces only filter the menu — the scene itself is shared. Check the workspace switcher: if you followed a link to a .gvw, Studio landed you in Orthodontics; the case bar and orthodontic tools live there.

Measurements don't behave on touch screens. Distance measurement, gallery drag, articulation — all require pointer-fine devices. Tablets and phones can still view scenes but the editing tools degrade.

A DICOM zip loads but the volume is blank. Cympha Studio expects an unzipped folder of .dcm slices, not a .zip archive (this is the opposite of app.cympha.com, which accepts zipped DICOM for upload). Extract the zip, then use Open DICOM… on the resulting folder.

My session is gone after a refresh. Studio's local-session restore offers a Restore previous session? prompt on next load. If you clicked Start fresh earlier, that session is wiped. To make sessions durable, use Save project as….

I can't find a tool that the docs say is there. Workspaces filter the menu. Cephalometric analysis…, Add facial scan…, Simulate articulation… are each only visible in the workspaces they belong to. Switch workspaces if the menu item you expect isn't there.

Last updated 2026-05-30.