Creating Structures

Essential Topic for learning Bottango.

Big idea

Use the “‘Create a New Part`” menu to create structures like cubes and spheres. Select a part to make basic edits like naming, sizing, and positioning.

Let’s build the structure of a simple robot that looks a lot like the one below.

Getting Started

1. Open a new, blank project in Bottango.

2. Click “Create Part” to create your first structure:

   

   This will cause the “‘Create a New Part`” window to show up:

   

3. Click “Cube” to create a new cube structure.

   

The four leftmost blue icons create different kinds of structures. There are four types of built-in structures:

• Cubes
• Cylinders
• Spheres
• Empty Points

Cubes, cylinders, and spheres all create parts of their namesake. Empty points can be useful when you need to group a series of parts under one invisible parent, or when you want to change the local axis of child parts.

You’ll create a default cube at the center of your project, and select it automatically.

Editing a Structure

Every structure has the following characteristics:

• Name
• Color
• Position at Home
• Rotation at Home
• Size
• Pivot

You will see all these settings for the structure in the Part Setup window on the right side of the screen, whenever one structure is selected. Some structure types have additional settings. For example, you can change the sphere structure type to a hemisphere.

1. Rename the cube to “BaseStructure using the “Name” field in the “Part Setup” window.

   

2. Resize the cube to 2.0 in the X dimension, 0.1 in the Y dimension, and 2.0 in the Z dimension.

There are three ways you can change the size of a structure:

1. You can enter the desired size in the text input fields under size.
2. You can click and drag left and right on the X, Y, or Z label to drag the number higher or lower. In fact, many number entry field in Bottango can be dragged in this way. This is often a great way to make quick adjustments to numbers.
3. You can use the scale handles to adjust the size of selected structures.

Select the scale tool in the tools panel to use the scale handle:

You can also press the R key to quickly change to the scale handle.

At this point you should have a single cube structure named “BaseStructure” in roughly this size: