Creating and Editing Primitives

All 3D programs offer a common array of basic geometric shapes known as primitives. Modo offers five basic primitives: cube, sphere, cylinder, cone, and torus. Each one has options that enable you to modify it to suit your needs.

Figure 2.2 shows modo's primitive palette. In addition to the five geometric shapes, the primitive palette contains the Tube tool, the polygon Pen tool, and the Text tool. Each of these can be created interactively or by dropping a preset-sized object into the current layer or a new layer. Simply clicking one of these icons starts the tool and enables you to interactively create any of the objects.

Holding the Ctrl/Control key and clicking a primitive icon creates a unit primitive. Figure 2.3 shows the change of icon indicating a unit primitive option. This is an object with the default dimensions and settings. Holding the Shift key and clicking a primitive icon creates a unit primitive in a new mesh item (see Figure 2.4).