 Welcome back everyone! I'm Michael Bailey of Avocon, also known around the metaverse as Marcus Llewellyn. We've already come a long way in learning how to edit and change basic prims. In this tutorial, we're going to learn some new tools for changing the shape of prims. In addition to hollowing out a prim or cutting it, you can also taper, dimple, shear, or twist them. When you taper something, you usually make it smaller at one end. When you shear something, it usually looks a little lopsided like it's leaning over a bit. However, paper and shear can look quite different when used on other kinds of primitives. For this tutorial, your job really is to experiment with all the different basic shapes and to see what happens. Note that as you follow along, you will notice that different shapes show different taper and tops your options differently in the Object tab of the Build window. When a prim is tapered, the top end usually becomes smaller. A prim can be tapered from 0 to 1. And you can do it on both the X and Y axes. If you use negative numbers, the bottom of the prim will be tapered. Now let's practice a little bit. Open our Build window and raise a cube and also a cylinder. Now let's focus on our cube and taper it all the way to 1 on the X axis and all the way to 1 on the Y axis. And let's do the same thing for the cylinder. You'll see you now have a pyramid and a cone. In an earlier tutorial, you may remember that I said that some basic primitives rely on other basic primitives. If you look in your Build window at the shapes you can raise, there is a pyramid and a cone. And all these really are are a cube and a cylinder that have already been tapered for you. Try raising some other basic shapes and using taper on them. Make them smaller in larger values and practice and see what kind of shapes you can make. Spheres and half spheres cannot be tapered. Instead, they can be dimpled. Just like the dimple on someone's chin, a dimple on a sphere makes a small dent. But just at one end. Let's explore this by raising a sphere to raise it up a little bit so we can see the top and the bottom very well. Now let's look for dimple in the object tab of our Build window. And you can see it has a beginning and an end. Let's start with the end and pressing the down arrow. You can see that the top sort of opened up in a concave shape or dimple. If we do the same thing from the bottom, using the begin setting, you get the same effect. Play around with this and try to combine it with some of the other tools you've learned to use like hollow or path cut and explore what kind of shapes you can make out of a sphere. For some prims, such as cubes and cylinders, the top shear control will make them look like they're leaning to one side. For other prims, such as toruses or rings, top shear will distort them in unexpected ways. You can use top shear on the x-red axis or on the y-green axis or both. Let's explore this now by opening our Build window and let's start by raising a cube. And then let's also raise a cylinder. Now let's go to our cube and in our Build window, under the Object tab, look for top shear. Let's start with the x-axis and the top arrow. And let's click that until it's all the way up. Like we said, our cube now looks like it's tilted to one side. Now let's try it on the cylinder. This time, under top shear, we're going to use the y-axis and the down arrow. And again, we're going to click it all the way. We have another lopsided prim, but this time, it's in a different direction. Now let's clean these up and let's raise a torus and then a tube. Now let's select our torus and look for top shear. Again, we'll start with the x-axis and the up arrow. Move it all the way up. And you can see the entire ring looks like it's tilted. Let's try this again on the tube. We'll use the y-axis and the down arrow all the way down. And it looks kind of like it's been flattened. We'll use each basic prim shape and experiment with the top shear control. Change the settings for both the x and y-axes and see what happens. The final thing we'll learn in this tutorial is to learn how to twist different shapes in different ways. Much like twisting a towel or crumpling a piece of paper, twisting prims will lead to some very interesting shapes. Take your time and fully explore how the twisting controls affect each different shape. For some shapes you will have additional twist controls which can be explained along the way. Some shapes, such as cubes and cylinders, have only a simple twist begin and end control. To really twist these shapes choose a large beginning number and a large negative ending number. Let's begin to explore this by opening our build window. And let's raise a cube. Now let's stretch our cube up a bit so we can see the twist at its best. Now in our build window under the object tab look for twist begin and end. We're going to start with the beginning and using the up arrow. Let's go as far as it'll let us. You can already see that we have kind of a screw shape prim now. Now let's use the end control in the down arrow. And with a negative value it twists it even more. Let's try this now with a cylinder. We'll raise that on the ground and once again we'll stretch this up a little ways. Now in our twist control let's use the beginning and once again let's twist it all the way up. Now on a cylinder it's harder to see the twist. But if we path cut it a bit you can see that it really is twisted. Other shapes that are based on the cube and cylinder will act much the same way. Try twisting pyramids, triangles and cones. Like cubes and cylinders spheres only have the twist begin and end control. However the results of using that one control are really neat. Let's open our build window and raise the sphere. Now on this one you're going to want to be able to move your camera around a lot because the results are very unexpected. Go to your twist control and start clicking the up arrow at the beginning of the twist. Was that what you expected? Because it isn't what I would expect but it's really cool. And now if we use the down arrow at the end of the twist all the way you can see we've created a really interesting shape. We can combine this with things like hollow to make it even more interesting. If you practice and try combining hollow and dimple you can probably achieve a flower like petal shape. Go ahead and try that. As you see now along, forces, tubes and rings always seem to do unexpected and surprising things and twisting them is no exception. You can easily make springs and curl shapes. In fact these shapes have additional twist controls that you can change. In addition to twist begin and end you can control the whole size. It's radius, it's revolutions and it's skew. Let's begin to explore these one by one. Open our build window and let's rise a torus. Now in the object tab look for whole size. X and down arrow. Let's start clicking that. You can see it changes the height of the torus. If we use the Y value you can make the hole in the middle smaller or larger. Now let's try the radius. If you look at the bottom of the object tab you'll find it right there. Now let's start clicking on the up arrow and you'll see one end sort of contract towards the middle. If you go the other way the other side contracts. Now let's switch to revolutions. As you can see it's currently at 1. If we click on the up arrow the torus begins to twist like a spring. If we increase the hole size the spring will also increase in height. Let's try skew. And you'll find that right next to the hollow control. Let's start with the up arrow. You'll see it sort of flattens it out. Play with these and you'll wind up with some amazingly complex shapes. This is one reason that many plant like and hair prints begin with toruses or tubes. They can be changed in radical ways. Expert builders spend a lot of time learning how to make exactly the right shape. There's just no shortcut to learning these shapes and figuring out all that they can do. If you find you've made something unique and beautiful remember to name it save it and store it in your inventory so you can use it again later. Learning about shapes never ends. Just when you think you've seen it all you learn something new. The best builders never stop learning. What would happen if you were to combine the techniques we learned in this tutorial with all of the techniques we've learned so far in this video series. Set aside some time to res different types of prims and apply all of the build tools you've learned in as many combinations as you can think of. This is the best way to familiarize yourself with all of the things that prims can do. This video tutorial is at its end but if you want to make the most of what we've learned keep practicing. In the next video tutorial we'll learn how to apply images or textures to prims. See you next time and keep having fun building.