How To Use The Maker Pen In Rec Room Tutorial | Create Shapes, Recolour, Texture and Summon Props ✅

Hey everybody, it’s UnderMyCap and welcome back to another video! Today I’m going to be showing you how to use the Maker Pen in Rec Room. This is Part One of a brand new series where I’m going to be showing you how to create inside of Rec Room. If you enjoy this, make sure to leave a like and subscribe — there will also be a playlist with a whole bunch of future videos for this tutorial series, so make sure to watch the rest of them as it really helps me out!

If you’d prefer to watch the video version, you can check it out here: How To Use The Maker Pen In Rec Room Tutorial | Create Shapes, Recolour, Texture and Summon Props

What We’re Covering Today

Today we’re going to be covering the Create Tool and the Recolouring Tool. To demonstrate these, I’m going to be showing you how to build a very basic table inside Rec Room, which involves working with colours, textures, and shapes. We’re mainly going to be using the square shape, but we’ll cover a whole bunch of other things in the next videos as we advance. So without further ado, let’s get straight into it!

How To Get The Maker Pen

First things first — let’s cover how to actually get the Maker Pen. You’ll want to go to your watch and click on it to bring up the watch menu. You’ll see a whole bunch of icons you can click on. What you want to focus on is Backpack, so go ahead and click on that. When you click on Backpack, four main tools will pop up. If it pops up with skins or food instead, don’t worry — simply click on Tools at the very top and you’ll be taken to the right menu. From there, click Use on the Maker Pen. I would also highly recommend that you favourite it, as favouriting allows you to pull your Maker Pen out of your backpack and start building whenever you want, as long as you have Maker Pen permissions.

Understanding The Maker Pen

Now that we have the Maker Pen, let’s go over the basics of how it works. If you’re in VR, you pull your gun trigger or trigger handle to spawn in a shape. If you’re on a computer, you simply left click, and you’ll have the same menu with all of the options to build. When you first start building, it’s most likely that you’ll only be able to spawn in orange cubes — that’s completely normal and we’re going to look at how to change that very shortly.

Using The Create Tool

To access all of the shape and colour options, you’ll want to make sure you’re on the Create Tool, which is the orange button. Once you’re there, click on Palette. The Palette is where all of your spawnable items live — it’s where you select shapes, props, and colours. It doesn’t customise anything on its own; it simply gives you all of the options available to you. Inside the Palette, you’ll find a whole range of shapes including spheres, wedges, dodecahedrons, tubes, and much more. Each one has its own unique use case depending on what you’re building.

Tubes in particular are incredibly powerful and versatile. Believe it or not, a lot of the environment you might see in various Rec Room worlds — poles, trees, wishing wells, bushes — can all be made using tubes. Because tubes are a little more advanced, we’ll be covering those in a future upload, but it’s exciting to know just how much is possible with them!

Customising Colours and Textures With Swatches

Now let’s look at what you can change about the colour and appearance of your shapes. If you go to Swatches in the Maker Pen menu, you’ll find a range of predefined options you can use. Swatches basically represent different types of textures or colours for your shapes. You can also fully customise these — so if you want to create a shape in a specific colour and texture, click on one of your swatches and you’ll be able to customise everything about it.

For example, let’s say you want to make a red dodecahedron. You’d click on the colour option (which might say “orange” for you by default), select red, and hit done. Now when you spawn in the shape, it’ll appear in red. You can also change the texture of the shape right below the colour option in the Palette. There are options like painted bricks, painted wall, dirt, glossy plastic, carpet, and more — so you have plenty of variety to work with.

The last part of the colour customisation to be aware of is texture size. This controls how zoomed in or zoomed out you are on a texture. For example, if your texture size is set below 100%, the texture will appear less zoomed in. If you drag the slider all the way up, the texture will be very zoomed in on the shape. And if you zoom out a lot, the texture will appear more detailed and smaller in scale. It’s a subtle but useful tool for getting the exact look you want, so feel free to experiment with it!

Spawning Props

Aside from shapes, you can also spawn in Props. Props are pre-made assets from other parts of Rec Room, and they’re a great starting point if you’re just getting familiar with the Maker Pen. To access them, click on Palette and then select Props. You’ll find a wide variety of items — swords, cameras, and all sorts of fun things. Props are a handy tool, especially when you’re just beginning your building journey in Rec Room!

Using Snapping and Uniform Shapes

One really important feature to be aware of when using the Create Tool is Snapping and Uniform Shapes. Without these turned on, your shapes can end up randomly placed and not aligned to any grid, which makes building structures like a table quite tricky. To enable snapping, look for the snapping icon at the very top of the menu and set it to Grid. Once grid snapping is on, your shapes will stay aligned and uniform — which is exactly what we need for building a clean table.

To turn on Uniform Shapes, click on the Create Tool, then click on the Create Tool Settings on the right-hand side, scroll down, and you’ll find the Uniform Shapes toggle. With uniform shapes enabled, every shape you spawn in will be consistent in size, which makes building a lot cleaner and easier to manage.

Building A Basic Table

Now that we understand the core tools, let’s put them into practice by building a very simple table! I want to be upfront — this is a basic method and not necessarily the most advanced way to build a table in Rec Room. Since we’re not covering the scale, move, or clone tools in this tutorial, we’re keeping things as simple as possible and focusing on just the colour spawning and Create Tool fundamentals.

Start by spawning in a square shape with snapping enabled to use as your tabletop. Then, ducking under the table perspective, add legs by spawning in additional squares in the correct positions. Once you’ve got the basic structure in place, it’s time to make it look like an actual table by applying a more fitting colour and texture. Open up your Maker Pen menu, click on Create, go to Palette, click on Swatches, and select a swatch to customise. Change the colour to a nice brown and set the texture to Wood Grain. Then head over to the Recolour Tool, click on each of the shapes you just made, and watch your table transform into something that looks the part. And just like that — you’ve built a basic table in Rec Room using the Maker Pen!

What’s Coming Next

You should feel really proud of yourself for making it this far — seriously, great work! In the next video, we’re going to be covering a few more tools including the Select Tool, the Move Tool, and the Scale Tool — basically everything you need to know about transforming shapes. As you can see, our table is a little off-skew right now, and those tools are exactly what we’ll use to fix that and take our builds to the next level. There’s a lot of exciting content coming in this series, so stay tuned!

If you enjoyed this tutorial, make sure to leave a like and subscribe — it really does mean a lot. I’ll see you in the next one!