PRIMITIVES MENU
To bring up the Primitives Menu, RMB on the Geometry window with nothing currently selected. When adding primitives, deselect everything (e.g press Space bar) before or on the workspace when everything is deselected.
You will be presented with a list of available primitives to add to your workspace. LMB on one of the primitives to add it. It will be added to the center of the scene as an unselected object at its default size.
Note: When adding new primitives, you may need to turn other objects’ visibility off (via the Objects Menu), or move existing objects away from the Origin of the grid, in order to see the newly added object.
Many of the commands on the Primitives menu are plugins developed by the Wings 3D community and are now included as part of the standard distribution. To add/remove the commands see [Edit | Plug-In Manager].
The complete list of standard primitives is given below.
Notice that some primitives have an options icon to the right of their name. If you click on the options icon – or RMB – you will be presented with some options (number of sections, number of slices, etc.) that you can change to configure the primitive before it is added to the workspace.
Primitives | Tetrahedron
Creates a four sided object, a triangular pyramid. Option to change the edge length.
Primitives | Octrahedron
Creates an eight sided object.
Primitives | Octotoad
Creates a twenty-six sided object, unique to Wings 3D. Designed by Mike (roadtoad), one of the original hosts of the Wings 3D discussion forum, and added to the Wings 3D primitives as a tribute to the great service this board provided in the further development of Wings 3D.
Primitives | Dodecahedron
Creates a solid object with twelve faces. Option to change the edge length.
Primitives | Icosahedron
Creates a solid object with twenty faces. Option to change the edge length.
Primitives | Cube
Creates a cube – which is what most models start out as. By default this is a standard symmetrical shape, but with the option to change the edge lengths of the X, Y and Z sides.
Primitives | Cylinder
Creates a cylinder (default 16 sections) with the options to adjust the number of sections, height of the cylinder, and the diameters of the top and bottom faces.
Primitives | Cone
Creates a cone (default 16 sections) with the options to adjust the number of sections, height of the cone, and the diameter of the bottom faces.
Primitives | Sphere
Creates a sphere with sections (16 by default) and slices (8 by default), with options to change these and the X, Y radials to generate a longer or flatter shape.
Primitives | Torus
Creates a torus with sections (16 by default) and slices (8 by default), with options to change these and the major X, Z radii to generate a wider ring, and the minor radius to create a thinner/fatter object.
Primitives | Grid
Creates a grid – a thin, flattened object with one face split into rows/columns (10 by default). The options allow you to specify the number of rows/columns, the height (thickness) of the grid object, and the X,Y spacing of the rows/columns.
Primitives | Text
(Plugin : wpc_tt by Howard Trickey). Adds a text string as a 3D object based on the font shape. The option dialog allows you to set the text string and the location of the TrueType font. You can also set the number of edge bisections which will make the result smoother – but increasingly complex. It’s recommended that you leave this set to zero, at least for starters.
Primitives | Light
Adds a light to the scene. Wings 3D offers these types of lights:
- Infinite – a light like the sun, providing essentially parallel light rays as they pass equally throughout the workspace in the same direction.
- Point – a light like a light bulb, radiating light equally in all directions from its source.
- Spot – casting light in a cone shape, in a general direction but spreading out so that the rays are not parallel.
- Ambient – a general background light present everywhere. It has no locational source nor direction. Since ambient light is everywhere from all directions it can cause your model to look completely flat if used by itself. So always use ambient lights in conjunction with other light sources.
- Area – an object, initially flat, that radiates light.
Lights in Wings 3D are further explained in the Help Menu under Light Basics. Light parameters are adjusted by selecting a light and then right clicking to bring up the Light Operations Menu, to change position, intensity, color, etc.
Primitives | Material
Creates a new material, and opens a dialog to set its properties. The material is added to the the Outliner window.
To add an image as a texture to the material, select the image in Outliner window and ‘Pick up Image’. Select the material in Outliner window, chose ‘Drop picked object’, and add the image as to the texture type. To remove the texture, edit the material and delete the texture type.
Primitives | Image
Creates a basic image that can be used as a texture for materials. The options are Grid, Checkerboard, Horizontal Bars, Vertical Bars, Black and White.
Primitives | Image Plane
Imports an image and pastes it to a plane, which is centered at the origin. Opens a dialog to select the image file, which can be a .bmp, .jpg, .tif, .png, or .tga file, all of which must be 24 bits deep. The imported image can be used as a texture in a material.
You can use this as a reference plane to assist you in your modeling. You can use two Image primitives to perform a modeling technique know as Rotoscoping, where one image is from the front and the other from the side of a given subject. You can then arrange the image planes into an L shape and use Orthogonal views from X and Z axes to sculpt your model to fit the images. If there is also a view from the top/bottom, then this can be used to sculpt by viewing along the Y axis.
Be aware that Wings 3D works with images sized by powers of 2 (1024×1024 or 64×128 for example). This does not mean that Wings 3D will not load your image if it is not so sized, but it will pad it to be powers of two prior to displaying it. This should be transparent to the user.
Primitives | Bounding Box
Displays the Create Bounding Box dialog. For more details, see the related bounding box commands at [Tools | Bounding Box].
Primitives | Gear
(Plugin: wpc_gear). {? ?}
Primitives | Tube
(Plugin: wpc_gear). {? ?}
Primitives | GeoDome
(Plugin: wpc_geodome). {? ?}
Primitives | Torus Knot
(Plug-in: wpc_knot by Anthony D’Agostino (scorpius)). This simple plug-in creates a torus knot with the absolute minimum possible number of faces and vertices. It is meant to be used as an input “cage” for the Catmull-Clark subdivision algorithm. The knot was originally created with Blender by extruding a Bezier circle along the path of a NURBS curve.
Primitives | N-Cube
(Plugin: wpc_ncube). {? ?}
Primitives | N-Gon
(Plugin: wpc_ncube). {? ?}
Primitives | Regular Plane
(Plugin : wpc_plane). {? ?}
Primitives | Lumpy Plane
(Plugin : wpc_plane). {? ?}
Primitives | Wavy Plane
(Plugin : wpc_plane). {? ?}
Primitives | Sombrero Plane
(Plugin : wpc_plane). {? ?}
Primitives | Spiral
Loops (2 by default), Segments (16 by default), Sections (8 by default).
Primitives | Spring
Loops (2 by default), Segments (16 by default), Sections (8 by default).
Primitives | UV Torus
A more sophisticated version of the torus. Here you can specify the U Resolution (80 by default), the V Resolution (16 by default), the Major Radius (1.0 by default) and the Minor Radius (0.2 by default) by clicking on the box on the right of the menu.
Primitives | Lumpy Torus
A variant of the UV Torus that adds two more parameters: Lumps (8 by default) and Lump Amplitude (0.5).
Primitives | Spiral Torus
Another variation on the UV Torus. Here you have parameters for Loops and Loop Radius instead of Lumps and Lump Amplitude.