Welcome flycatcher to the Carrara community. In addition to the various modellers (spline, vertex, text, metaball and terrain) you can also do some modeling right in the Assemble Room (the room you're in when Carrara starts up). You can throw down a sphere and add a Bulge modifier to make a quick barbell, for example (and this effect can be animated over time). Booleans used to be a faux pas but supposedly in C3 they work much better. Overlap a couple primitives and do an Edit/3D Boolean operation and then if you like you can double-click on the result to take it into the vertex modeler and do more work on it. If you have some dingbat fonts installed (they come with little shapes instead of letters) you can do some quick shapes in the Text modeller just adding bevels to a dingbat font letter. view/use collision detection can be handy for making sure that one object stacks neatly on top of another in the assemble room. anyway, hope you enjoy Carrra as much as I do.