From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

Creating primitives - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

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Creating primitives

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- [Instructor] Let's create some objects, starting with some basic primitives. A primitive is a building block object, and there are two places we can create from. There's the Create menu, and we can go into Standard Primitives and choose one of these, such as Sphere, or we can go over to the Command panel, and the default panel is Create It's got a plus sign, and below that are a bunch of categories of objects. The default category is Geometry. It's indicated by a little circle, and in this context, Geometry means an object. And the default type of Geometry is Standard Primitives. But you can see there are a bunch of categories. We'll stick with Standard Primitives for now, and we can create an object by clicking on the appropriate button. That will enter into a Creation tool. The default tool is Select Object, as seen on the main toolbar. When we click on one of these buttons, we're exiting out of the Select Object tool and entering into the Object Creation tool, such as Sphere. Click on the Sphere button, and then just click and drag in the Viewport to create a sphere. As long as this button is on, you can create more spheres. Just click and drag and make a bunch of spheres. Notice they all have random colors assigned. If we want to stop making spheres, we'll need to enter some other tool, and that's not done by clicking on the button again. That's just going to reenter the same tool. We need to exit this tool. One way to exit the tool is to go back to the Select Object tool. Just click on the appropriate button on the main toolbar. Now we can select those objects. Once we've created something, we can modify it. We can go over to the Modify panel, and we see we have some parameters, such as Radius. If we adjust this value, we'll change the radius. We can type in a radius. We can type in a value of 20, for example, and by default, that's going to be 20 inches. We'll talk more about units of measurement later. We can also adjust these values using the spinner arrows here. Click on the arrow, up or down, to change that value, or even better, click and hold and drag up and down to interactively adjust that particular parameter. Let's go back to Creation. We can create some other primitives. Each primitive is going to have a different number of parameters. For example, a box has length, width, and height, but a sphere only has a radius. If we want to create primitives interactively, we need to click and drag in very specific patterns in order to create an object that has meaningful dimensions. For a box, that process is as follows. We'll enter the Box Creation tool. Click and hold the mouse button down and drag, and you're setting the footprint. And you can see in the right-hand panel, we have Length and Width parameter values updating. Release the mouse, and then without clicking and dragging, just move the mouse. I'm not holding the button down. I'm just moving the mouse. And then when I have the height that I want, I can click, and that will end the creation of that particular primitive. So each one of these is going to have a slightly different process. For example, we can go over to Torus, a donut, and the process for that one is click and drag to set the first radius, release the mouse to set the second radius, and then click to end Creation mode. Another way we can exit out of Object Creation is to simply right-click anywhere in the Viewport, and that's going to send us back to, in this case, the Select Object tool, because that was the tool that I had active when I entered into Creation mode. I'm going to select all these. Drag a big Selection rectangle around everything and delete them by pressing the Delete key on the keyboard because I want to show you there's an alternate way of creating objects where we can enter in numeric values. And if you're trying to create an object at a specific place or with specific dimensions, this might be helpful. I can go into Box Creation, and we see there is a rollout called Keyboard Entry. A rollout is just a container for parameters. I can click to open that up, and we have the creation position here in X, Y, and Z. If I leave that at 0, my object will be created right at the origin, at the center of the world. And then we have the Length, Width, and Height parameters. We could create a box, or we could create a cube. If we choose cube, then we only have a length. The width and height will be identical, so for example, I could put in a value of 24, press Enter. This is going to create a cube that is 24 inches on the side, and while I'm at it, I can change the number of segments. That's the level of detail, and I can set these all to 12, press Tab, 12, press Tab, and press Enter. Now I'm going to create a cube that is 24 inches on the side and is subdivided 12 times in each dimension. Click the Create button, and I get a cube that has the requisite parameters that I've chosen. I don't see the internal edges here. We can enable that with a keyboard shortcut, which is F4. That's showing the segmentation. We'll talk more about Viewport display later, but that's a basic introduction to how to create primitives.

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