Design Nomenclature / Form & Geometry
Primitive
Also called box, cube, cylinder, cone, plane, primitive solid
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
A parametric solid supplied ready-made by a modeling application — box, sphere, cylinder, cone, plane, torus — described by a handful of numbers rather than by drawn geometry. Each carries a resolution parameter that fixes its polygon count at creation, before any deformation, and that number is difficult to change afterwards.
In practice
'Primitive modeling' means building by combining and deforming these rather than by sculpting or lofting curves. Nothing in the word implies a simple result.