Maya 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual Quickstart Guide

3. Creating Primitives and Text

Primitives are premade geometry sets, usually in simple shapes: spheres, cubes, cylinders, planes, cones, and toruses (Figure 3.1). You can also create more complex polygon primitives: prisms, pyramids, pipes, helixes, soccer balls, and platonic solids.

Figure 3.1. The basic primitives (clockwise, from top left): sphere, cube, cylinder, torus, plane, cone.

Primitives are the building blocks of 3D modeling, simplifying the creation of more complex objects. Some real-world objects can be constructed out of a single primitive shape: a baseball is a sphere, a door is a scaled cube, and a box of doughnuts is a box of ...