# Wings 3D/User Manual/The Primitives Menu

5.2.1 The Primitives Menu Primitives Menu – General
Figure 45: The Primitives pop-up menu. To bring up the Primitives Menu, right click on the empty workspace, or on a workspace where nothing is selected. You will be presented with a list of available primitives to add to your workspace. Left click on one of the primitives to add it. It will be added to the center of the scene as an unselected object at it's default size. You may need to turn other objects' visibility off (via the Objects Menu) in order to find the newly added object. The complete list of standard primitives is given below. Notice that some primitives have a little box icon to the right of their name. This is the Options Box for that primitive. If you click on the primitive name you will add a default primitive, whereas, if you click on the options icon you will be presented with some options (number of sections, number of slices, etc.) that you can change.
Tetrahedron – a four sided object; a triangular pyramid. Octrahedron – an eight sided object. Octotoad – A twenty-six sided object, unique to Wings. Designed by Mike (roadtoad), the host of the Wings discussion forum, and added to the Wings primitives as a tribute to the great service this board provided in the further development of Wings3D. Dodecahedron – a solid object with twelve faces. Icosahedron – a solid object with twenty faces. Cube – Plain and simple. What most models start out as. Cylinder – Click on the options button (the little box on the right) for the Sections option. A Windows dialog box will come up showing the number of sections in the cylinder (16 by default). You may change this and then click OK, or click Cancel. If you do not click on the options button, but simply click on the name Cylinder, then a default cylinder will be added (with 16 sides). Cone – Sections (16 by default). Sphere – Sections (16 by default) and Slices (8 by default). Torus – Sections (16 by default) and Slices (8 by default).
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� Section 5.2 The Context Sensitive Menus WINGS3D USER MANUAL Grid – Rows/Cols (10 by default). There is only one variable, so you must have the same number of rows and columns in your grid. After it is added you can change this by Dissolving some of the edges or by Connecting some of the edges to suite your needs. The default thickness of the grid is
0.2 units. Light – Adds a light to the scene. Wings supports four types of lights; Infinite, Point, Spot, and Ambient. Infinite lights act much as the sun, so that the light rays are essentially parallel as they pass equally throughout the workspace in the same direction. A point light is like a light bulb, radiating light equally in all directions from it's source. A spotlight casts light in a cone shape, in a general direction but spreading out so that the rays are not parallel. Finally, ambient light is the 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.4 Lights in Wings 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. Image – The Image Primitive is simply a plane that has an image pasted on it. The image can be a BMP, TIFF, or Targa file all of which must be 24 bits deep. Simply select Image, then select the type of image from the sub-menu, then navigate to the image file you want to use. Be aware that Wings works with images sized by powers of 2 (1024x1024 or 64x128 for example). This does not mean that Wings 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. Once you load the image a plane will appear centered on the screen standing up vertical on the Z axis. 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 4Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation, Revised Edition; Michael O'Rourke; W.W. Norton & Company, © 1998; pp. 89-92.
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 to sculpt your model to fit the images. Text – Adds a text string as a 3D object. If you click on the box to the right of Text you will get a pop-up options box. Here you can enter your text string, the name of any TrueType font you have on your system, the directory where the font resides (C:\windows\fonts for example) and the number of edge bisections to make. The more bisections you make, the more complex the model will be. I recommend you leave it set to zero at least for starters. OK will create the text as a fully 3D model in your workspace. Cancel will abort the operation. MORE – This brings up a sub-menu of additional primitives available in Wings.
Torus Knot – Originally a plug-in by Anthony D'Agostino (scorpius) it is now included as part of the standard Wings distribution. 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 created with Blender by extruding a Bezier circle along the path of a NURBS curve.
Spiral – Loops (2 by default), segments (16 by default), Sections (8 by default). You can change the number of Loops, Segments and Sections by clicking on the Options Box on the right side of the menu.
Spring – Loops (2 by default), segments (16 by default), Sections (8 by default). You can change the number of Loops by clicking on the Options Box to the right.
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. Lumpy Torus – A variant of the UV Torus that adds two more parameters; Lumps (8 by default) and Lump Amplitude (0.5).
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� WINGS3D USER MANUAL Section 5.2 6The Context Sensitive Menus Spiral Torus – another variation on effect if you remember they are there. You the UV Torus. Here you have parameters for will need to play around with the settings to Loops and Loop Radius instead of Lumps and get a good feel for how to create them, and Lump Amplitude. All of these More primitives how to use them effectively. are used rarely, but can be used to great
Figure 45a: The Wings primitives. Top row from left to right; Tetrahedron, Octahedron, Octotoad, Dodecahedron, and Icosahedron.
Second row; Cube, Cylinder, Cone, Sphere, and Torus. Third row; Grid, Image, Light and Text. Bottom row; Torus Knot, Spiral, Spring, UV Torus, Lumpy Torus, and Spiral Torus.