Although it is technically possible for an object to be without one, for all practical purposes an object must have a geometry component. The geometry component provides the essential definition of an object’s appearance and functionality.
If you are confused about the relationship between an object and its geometry, consider the following analogy: The geometry is a physical thing, let’s say a vase, and the object is a video camera taking its picture. You can zoom in or out or rotate the camera. That makes it appear bigger or smaller or rotated but it doesn’t affect the vase.
If you remove the vase, there is nothing to see. If you change the contrast or hue, that is analogous to applying shading. If you have several cameras on the same vase, that is cloning. If one camera zooms in, the vase only appears bigger in that one. But if you somehow make the vase bigger or paint it red, it will be bigger or red in all cameras.
When you add an object to the page, SiteSpinner™ automatically assigns it a geometry component bearing a system-defined name. For example, if you add an image object, its geometry component consists of the image file you imported to the object. This saves you the trouble of manually defining a geometry component.
But if you were to remove the image object’s geometry component using the Object Editor (selecting [no geometry]), the object would still exist in the project but would be invisible. If you were to change its geometry component, the object itself would be unchanged although it would appear entirely different and may even become a different object type, since the object gets its “type” from the geometry.
You can have objects share geometry components to save editing time and reduce the overall file size of your published project. For example, you can add a rectangle object, define its geometry component, add another rectangle, and then assign it the geometry component of the first rectangle. The two rectangle objects are now clones. (For more information, see Clone Object.)
The default prefixes of the system-assigned names of geometry components include “geo-“ for shape, vector drawing, table, image, and foreign objects, “rtf-“ for text objects, “title-“ for title objects, and “code-“ for code objects. You may rename geometry components, if you wish.