Identifying the Basic Building Blocks

See Geometry for details about types of objects and individual objects.

Standard Primitives—Relatively simple 3D objects such as Box, Sphere, and Cylinder, as well as Torus, Plane, Cone, GeoSphere, Tube,Teapot, and Pyramid.

Extended Primitives—More complex 3D objects such as a Capsule, OilTank, Spindle, Hedra, Torus Knot, and Prism.

Compound Objects—Compound objects include Booleans, Morph, ShapeMerge, and Loft. Booleans combine the geometry of two objects using union, intersection, and difference operations. Morphs are animated objects that change one geometric shape into other shapes over time. ShapeMerge lets you embed a spline shape into a geometric mesh. Loft uses shapes as cross sections along a path to produce a 3D object.

Particle Systems—Animated objects that simulate spray, snow, blizzard, and similar collections of small objects.

Patch Grids—Simple 2D surfaces ready for modeling or repairing existing meshes.

NURBS Surfaces—Analytically generated surfaces especially suited for modeling surfaces with complicated curves.

Dynamics Objects—Objects designed for use in dynamics simulations.

Splines—Common 2D shapes such as a Line, Rectangle, Circle, Ellipse, Arc, Donut, NGon, and Star. Text shapes support TrueType fonts. Section creates a spline from the cross-section of an object. Helix is a 3D shape.

NURBS Curves—A Point Curve and CV Curve provide the starting points for complex surfaces. See Introduction to NURBS Modeling.

Unlike physical building blocks, with fixed shape and size, you can change the parameters of objects and shapes to dramatically alter topology. Here are some examples of changes you can make:

You can collapse a building-block object to one of a variety of base geometric types once you no longer need access to its creation parameters. For example, you can convert any standard primitive to an editable mesh, editable poly, editable patch, or NURBS object, and you can convert a spline shape to an editable mesh, editable spline, or NURBS object. The easiest way to collapse an object is to select it, right-click it, and choose a "Convert to" option from the quad menu > Transform quadrant. This lets you use explicit editing methods with the object, such as transforming vertices. You can also use the Modify panel to collapse a primitive.

Most Geometry objects have an option for generating mapping coordinates. Objects need these mapping coordinates if you plan to apply a mapped material to them. Mapped materials include a wide range of rendered effects, from 2D bitmaps to reflections and refractions. See Mapping Coordinates and Using Maps to Enhance a Material. If mapping coordinates have already been applied to an object, the check box for this feature is turned on.