Make shapes

Everything starts as a shape. A crate, a pillar, a shield, a bottle. The useful surprise is that there are far fewer shapes than there look, because most of what you want is one shape with different numbers rather than a different shape altogether.

When you need this you are starting something new and need geometry on screen.

A shape is its numbers

A cylinder with four sides is a box. With three, a wedge. Take its top width to nothing and it is a cone, or a pyramid if you left the sides at four. None of those are separate nodes. They are one node with the numbers moved.

This matters more than it sounds. If you reach for a pyramid node and cannot find one, you will conclude the app cannot make pyramids. What is actually true is that the pyramid is where the cone already was.

So when a shape is nearly right, look at its numbers before you look for another node.

Sizes are in metres

One unit is one metre, and staying near real sizes keeps everything else working. A prop lands somewhere between 0.2 and 3, a person around 1.8, a scene under about 40 across.

Very small models cause trouble that does not look like a size problem: the operations that weld, cut and merge compare real distances, so a model built at a hundredth of normal has its detail collapse into itself.

Outlines, when a primitive will not do

Some shapes are a flat outline with thickness. Shields, signs, door plates, window frames. The Shape node draws one from a list of ten silhouettes and extrudes it, and it can punch a hole in the same move, using the same ten.

That is one node for a thing that would otherwise be a cut, a bevel and a lot of care.

Outlines, spun

Anything round and symmetrical is a drawn profile spun about the middle. Bottles, goblets, pillars, finials, wheels. Draw the silhouette as a handful of points, hand it to Lathe, and it sweeps it into a solid.

The knob worth knowing is how far it spins. Less than the whole way round gives you a cutaway, which is useful for showing an interior and for making half-round mouldings.

Put it on the ground

A shape is built around its own middle, so half of it starts below the floor.

Place On with nothing wired into its Base moves a shape so its underside sits at zero. It measures the shape each time, so it stays correct when the knobs change, which a typed offset does not.

If your shape was already drawn from the ground up, as a spun profile usually is, you do not need it at all.