Standard Primitives

A collection of standard primitive objects

Geometric primitives are familiar as objects in the real world such as beach balls, pipes, boxes, doughnuts, and ice cream cones. In 3ds max, you can model many such objects using a single primitive. You can also combine primitives into more complex objects, and further refine them with modifiers.

The program includes a set of 10 basic primitives. You can easily create the primitives with the mouse in the viewport, and most can be generated from the keyboard as well.

These primitives are listed in the Object Type rollout and on the Create menu:

Box

Cone

Sphere

GeoSphere

Cylinder

Tube

Torus

Pyramid

Teapot

Plane

Also available from the Object Type rollout is the AutoGrid option.

You can convert standard primitive objects to editable mesh objects and, editable polyobjects , and NURBS surfaces. You can also convert primitives to patch objects; see the path annotation at Editable Patch.

Two rollouts in each standard primitive's creation panel function identically for all primitives. These are:

Object Name and Wireframe Color

Creating Primitives from the Keyboard

The remaining rollouts are covered in the topic for each primitive.