The Create tab on the shelf contains tools for creating new geometry container objects containing various surface nodes. See the section on objects for more information.

Create ¶

Box

Creates a cube or six-sided rectangular box.

Sphere

Creates a sphere or ovoid surface.

Tube

Creates open or closed tubes, cones, or pyramids.

Torus

Creates a torus (doughnut) shaped surface.

Grid

Creates planar geometry.

Line

Creates polygon or NURBS lines from a position, direction, and distance.

Circle

Creates open or closed arcs, circles and ellipses.

Draw Curve

Creates a curve based on user input in the viewport.

Spray Paint

Spray paints random points onto a surface.

Platonic Solids

Creates platonic solids of different types.

Metaball

Creates metaballs and meta-superquadric surfaces.

File

Reads, writes, or caches geometry on disk.

Helix

Creates spirals and helices.

Quick Shapes

Creates different types of primitive geometry.

The create objects/create in context menu lets you choose where Houdini puts new geometry (that is, into which Geometry container objects it puts new generator nodes – nodes that create geometry, such as the Sphere surface nodes).

Click the icon in the operation toolbar and choose one of the following options:

	Create new objects	Each time you use geometry creation tools from the shelf, Houdini creates a new geometry container object for the geometry. This is the default.
	Create in context	If you have a geometry container object selected when you use geometry creation tools from the shelf, Houdini puts the nodes for the new geometry inside the selected container. This lets you add generators interactively at the geometry level, instead of creating them as new objects and Combine-ing them in.

The create objects menu also contains a Keep original objects option.

• When this option is off, using a tool such as Loft or Boolean will delete the “input” objects (in the case of Loft, the profile curves, and in the case of Boolean the shapes to combine).

• When this option is on, the input objects will remain in the scene.

• You can temporarily turn this option on by holding ⌃ Ctrl when you click a modeling tool.

• Box up modeling

• Curve up modeling