The Cone primitive provides the user with a simple method for creating conical shapes. There are many paramaters available to the user to create variations on the default 1 meter cone. By dragging in the 3D viewport with the Cone tool active you can create the initial plane for the cone. Once the initial plane is created, clicking away from one of the handles will snap that handle to the mouse position so that you can add dimension to the shape, or simply change the current values. If you wish to drag out a 3D cone, hold the CTRL key while dragging in the 3D view.
There are also "Alternate" commands assigned to all of the Primitive Tool icons. The alternate commands allow you to CTRL click on the icon to quickly create a unit primitive without interacting with the tool or SHIFT click the icon to create a unit primitive inside a new Mesh Item.
The parameters for the cone tool include:
Position X,Y,Z: These three values establish the 3D location for the center of the cone.
Size X,Y,Z: These three values are used to establish the dimensions of the cone. Set to 50 cm, 75 cm, 50 cm by default. As a radius they produce a cone that is .75 meter tall and 1 meter across at the base.
Sides: The sides are the latitudinal edges of the cone running from top to bottom. By default the primitive cone uses 24 sides. By increasing this value you can increase the number of "cuts" in the cone.This also increases the smoothness of the cone by adding extra facets.
Segments: The segments are longitudinal edges of the sphere running from right to left. By default the primitive cone uses 12 segments. By increasing this value you can increase the number of "cuts" along the cone. This is useful if you plan to deform the cone as these segments act as "hinges" during deformation operations.
Axis: This X,Y,Z choice allows you to quickly change the orientation of the cone.
Make UVs: When this button is active a UV map will be automatically generated for the geometry created with the tool. This is a very useful option if you plan to UV map the model you are creating from the primitive as it provides a baseline UV map that you can massage later in the modeling process. In many cases this can reduce the amount of work required to map the model.
Min XYZ/Max XYZ: Users may also define the shape based on specific X, Y and Z bounding box locations in 3D space which can be specified here. This makes it easy to place a cone on the ground plane for instance by making the 'Min Y' value '0' and the 'Max Y' value '1m'.
TIP: The Cone primitive supports symmetrical creation. When Symmetry is activated, creating the primitive shape will create an identical version across the specified axis.
