up, down, left and right arrows - shift view up, down, left and right.

o - toggle between perspective and orthogonal views.

w - toggle between shaded view and wire-frame view of model.

F5 - select all faces with 5 or more vertices (very useful).

l - select edge loop (naturally enough, this only works on edges).

See the following lists for brief descriptions of the various keyboard shortcuts you should use, to get the maximum out of Wings 3D. Novice artists will get stuck if not conversant with the various keyboard short-cuts, particularly in applications like Wings 3D and Blender. Just like in Maya, you also have an outliner under the Window menu, which provides a list of all objects in the scene, stacked in order of their creation, and linked to each other.

You can customise the mouse function under Edit –> Preferences, to resemble other high-end applications that you may be used to. Figure 1: The final design of the airplane Figure 2: The default layout The four cubes that you observe on the centre top are the four selection modes: vertices selection, edge selection, face selection and object selection. But that does not prevent Wings 3D from being a great subdivision surface modeller. Unlike other high-end 3D applications, you do not have the screen split into 4 views. You might find the GUI unusual - Figure 2 shows what the default screen of Wings 3D looks like once you fire it up. Mark the Wings 3D package for installation, and once installed, fire it up from the terminal.įigure 1 shows a thumbnail of the result of our design, so you know what we are working to achieve. If you use another distro, try the package manager (Synaptic for Debian and derivatives, RPM or Yum for Red Hat and its derivatives). For hardcore Linux fans, it’s easier - either use ArtistX (a customised version of Ubuntu 8.10) or the Knoppix 5.3.1 live DVD both these distros have Wings 3D installed and preconfigured. If you have access to the Net, just visit the website ( ), and download a suitable version for your platform. This two-part series demonstrates how you can use Wings 3D to create a model of an airplane. For those of you who are artists, and eager to get into 3D art but lack the resources to get high-end packages like Maya, Max, Softimage, Houdini, LightWave, etc, here is a launchpad! Wings 3D, a subdivision modeller inspired by Nendo and Mirai from Izware, has served thousands of artists across the globe as a dedicated 3D modeller.

Wings 3d model