Open cloud files in Studio

Opening a cloud file with View in 3D viewer puts the scan or plan in Cympha Studio, so you can review or measure it before you attach it to the dental case it belongs to.

Audience: Clinicians, lab managers, and designers who have a 3D file in their cloud (a scan, a treatment plan, a Cympha project bundle) and want to look at it in Cympha Studio — measure, review, screenshot — without first attaching it to a case.

You'll come away knowing: which file formats open in Studio, where the View in 3D viewer action lives, what Studio does with the file once it opens, and how this fits with the case workflow if you decide the file is worth turning into a case after all.

Time required: Seconds. The whole flow is two clicks: open the row menu, click view.

Before you start

You need:

A file already in your cloud at app.cympha.com/cloud. If it's not there yet, see manage files in your Cympha Cloud first.
The file in a viewable format. Cympha Studio's "open by URL" entry recognises:
- .stl, .ply, .obj — standard 3D meshes (intraoral scans, model exports).
- .gvw, .gvw.zip — GuideMia OrthoPlus treatment cases. These carry the planned tooth positions, segmentation, and any markups from a previous design session.
- .cyp — Cympha project bundle (a single zip with a manifest and assets). Studio opens this directly from a presigned URL.
A modern browser. Studio runs entirely in the browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari on desktop. On mobile it loads but the workspace is designed for a real screen.

Studio without a case — opening from My Cloud is a viewer-mode handoff. You're inspecting the file. To do real design work (request changes, save back as a .cyp, run AI categories), you'll want a case — see create cympha case from Studio for the in-Studio path.

Step 1 — Find the file in your cloud

Open app.cympha.com/cloud and navigate to the folder that contains the file. The breadcrumb at the top of the My Cloud browser shows where you are; click any segment to jump up.

Each file row shows the file name, size in B/KB/MB, and a three-dot More actions menu on the right.

Step 2 — Open the row menu

Click the three-dot More actions button on the file's row. The menu includes:

Download — always shown.
Share — to send the file to someone else (see share a file from your cloud).
View in 3D viewer — shown only when Cympha recognises the extension as viewable. If you see Open in browser instead, the file isn't a 3D format Studio handles — clicking it just downloads/opens the raw file in a new tab.
Rename, Move, Delete — file-management actions covered in manage files in your Cympha Cloud.

Step 3 — Click "View in 3D viewer"

Click View in 3D viewer. Two things happen:

Cympha generates a short-lived presigned download URL for the file (an authenticated, expiring link directly to your storage).
A new browser tab opens at Studio's "open a model by URL" entry: https://studio.cympha.com/#/new?model=<presigned-url>. Studio auto-detects whether the URL points at a mesh, a .gvw project, or a .cyp bundle, and dispatches to the right loader.

You don't have to sign into Studio separately for this — the file is served via the presigned URL, not via Studio's own auth. If the file is large (CBCT, complex .cyp), Studio shows a loading state while it streams.

Why a presigned URL and not a direct link — your cloud files are private. The presigned URL is a one-time, short-lived signature that lets Studio fetch the bytes without exposing your credentials. The URL stops working after a few minutes; you can't share it as a permanent link.

Step 4 — Work in Studio

What you can do depends on the file type:

Mesh (.stl, .ply, .obj) — orbit, zoom, measure point-to-point distances in millimetres, take screenshots. No segmentation or planning state ships with a raw mesh, so the workspace is the generic mesh viewer. (Cross-sectional slice views are a CBCT feature — they need a DICOM volume loaded, not a mesh.)
.gvw / .gvw.zip — Studio loads it as a GuideMia project. You get the segmented teeth, any planned positions, and the step bar at the bottom. Useful for reviewing a design without owning a copy.
.cyp — full Cympha project bundle. Studio reads the manifest and restores the workspace state — segmentation, plan, markups, anything that was saved.

You can:

Take screenshots and save them locally.
Measure and annotate (annotations live in-session unless you save).
Save your work as .cyp — if you want to capture your work, save it to a fresh .cyp via Save project as… in Studio's hamburger menu, then upload that .cyp back into your cloud.
Push a revised case plan back — for a .gvw opened from a cloud URL, a signed-in reviewer gets a cloud-upload button on the case bar that saves the revised case plan straight back next to the source file, with no download step.
Create a case from here — Studio has a Create Cympha Case action that captures the current scene as the starting point of a new case. See create cympha case from Studio.

Step 5 — Multi-select (the workaround)

The per-row menu opens one file at a time — there is no multi-select Open in Studio action in this iteration. Two workarounds if you need multiple files in the same Studio session:

Save them as a single .cyp bundle. If they're parts of one design (upper scan + lower scan + bite), the canonical way is a project bundle that contains all of them. Build it in Studio once, upload back to My Cloud, then a single View in 3D viewer click loads everything.
Open each in its own tab. Click View in 3D viewer on each file in turn. Each opens in a separate Studio tab. Studio tabs are isolated, so you can flip between them but they can't share state.

What happens next

The file stays in My Cloud — viewing doesn't move or modify it.
Viewing never overwrites the original file. For meshes and .cyp bundles, changes you make in Studio live only in the Studio tab unless you explicitly save and re-upload. For a .gvw opened from a cloud URL, a signed-in reviewer can push the revised case plan back with the cloud-upload button — it saves next to the source file rather than overwriting it.
If you decide the file is the start of a real workflow, use Studio's Create Cympha case action (see create cympha case from Studio) or close Studio and use create a case from your cloud folder for a folder-driven path.
The presigned URL expires. If you bookmark the Studio URL it'll stop working after the expiry window; reopen from My Cloud to get a fresh one.

Troubleshooting

The menu shows "Open in browser" instead of "View in 3D viewer". The file's extension isn't one Studio recognises as 3D. Either it's a non-3D file (PDF, image, doc) or a format Studio doesn't currently parse. Use Download instead, or convert/export to one of the supported formats (.stl, .ply, .obj, .gvw, .gvw.zip, .cyp).

The Studio tab opens but the scene is empty. Usually the presigned URL expired before Studio could fetch it, or the file is corrupted / wrong-extension-spoofed. Close the tab, go back to My Cloud, and click View in 3D viewer again to get a fresh URL.

Toast says "Could not open viewer". The presigned-URL request to the cloud API failed — most often a transient auth blip. Refresh the cloud page and retry. If it persists, your session may have expired; sign out and sign back in.

Studio shows the file but it's huge / oriented wrong / floating in space. That's the source file, not Studio. Raw meshes carry their own coordinate system; if it was exported from a non-dental tool the orientation may not match Cympha's conventions. Use Studio's transform tools to reposition, or re-export from the original software with a sensible reference frame.

I made changes in Studio and want them in my cloud. For a .gvw opened from a cloud URL, sign in and use the cloud-upload button to push the revised case plan back. Otherwise, save from Studio's hamburger menu (Save project as…) to your local machine, then upload the .cyp back into My Cloud — that becomes a new file alongside the original.

I want this file on a case, not just in the viewer. Two paths: (1) close Studio, go to the folder in My Cloud, use Create case from folder (see create a case from your cloud folder); (2) inside Studio, use Create Cympha case to spin a case from the current scene (see create cympha case from Studio).