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Aether chat panel

Aether is the Designer's in-app AI agent. It can read your scene, run any of the 123 tools the Designer exposes, and explain what it did. The chat panel is how you talk to it.

Aether chat panel docked to the right of the View Panel mid-conversation

Opening

Path Where
File > 🌌 Aether (chat with the agent)… Menu bar
Cmd+/ (macOS) or Ctrl+/ (other) Keyboard
The 🌌 button on the shelf Quick-access

The panel opens floating by default. Drag its title bar to dock it to any edge of the window; the layout persists.

Anatomy

  • Conversation log: top region. Aether's messages are rendered with markdown, code blocks, and "tool call" cards.
  • Tool call cards: collapsible panels showing exactly which tool Aether invoked, the arguments, and the result. Useful for audit and reproducibility.
  • Input field: bottom, two-line by default; press Shift+Enter to add a newline, Enter to send.
  • Session controls: top-right: new session, history, snapshot, settings.

Sessions

Each conversation lives in a session. Sessions remember the Designer's snapshot at the start (which placements existed, the current selection, the active menu set) so future questions can reference "the wing" or "the brush we just authored".

Session > New starts fresh; Session > History lists previous sessions (searchable by content).

Providers

The active provider is set in Preferences > AI. Aether supports:

Provider Latency Best for
Anthropic Claude Low Default. Best at multi-step tool use.
OpenAI GPT-4 Low Strong general assistant.
Ollama (local) Higher Free, offline. Slower; smaller models.

Switching provider mid-session restarts the agent's context. The panel shows which provider is active in the bottom-left.

What Aether can do

The 123 tools span 15 modules: mesh, theme, render, anim, rig, sim, procedural, brush, path, curves, window, view, arrange, file, code. Examples:

  • "Make the butterfly's iridescence warmer." → theme.set_palette, render.adjust_material.
  • "Rotate this wing 10 degrees around its hinge." → mesh.set_channel, anim.set_key.
  • "Scaffold a Python handler for the play button." → code.scaffold_handlers.
  • "Show me the current Render Quality." → render.get_quality.

The full catalog with example prompts is in the Aether tool reference (auto-generated from the shipping code).

Safety

Aether asks for confirmation before destructive actions: deleting placements, overwriting baked textures, exporting to disk. The confirm dialog shows the exact tool call so you know what is about to run. Configure auto-confirm thresholds in Safety and limits.

Snapshots

Session > Snapshot saves the current scene state as a named restore point. Aether sees snapshots and can "go back to the snapshot before we tried the BBox pipeline" without you using undo manually.

Code surface

Everything Aether can do is also reachable from the menu bar and the toolbox. The chat panel is a convenience surface, not a necessity. The same actions are scriptable from a paired Python handler via the Code Link bridge.