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Turn a hand-built construction into a live, parametric node graph.
You draw a motif by hand on the Modeling canvas - points, lines, circles, an entire construction. Convert to Nodes takes the object(s) you select and rebuilds them as a node graph you can drive with sliders and reference points. Whatever your selection leans on but you didn't select - the points, lines, or curves upstream of it - stays live on the canvas and feeds in as a reference. The selection is the boundary: select more to convert more; leave something unselected and it stays a live input. It's the parametric counterpart to drawing by hand: sketch it once, then repeat and vary it in the node system.
The result comes in three parts:
- Root points, sliders, and toggles, kept outside. The free points your construction hangs off stay on the canvas and feed the graph through Reference nodes: so dragging a root point on the canvas drives the whole graph live. Anything else upstream that you didn't select - a line or curve the selection leans on - is referenced the same way, staying live rather than rebuilt. Free values that aren't points (a point's position along a curve, a divide count, an offset distance) come in as Sliders; and the either/or choices your construction made - an arc's winding, which side a tangent or angle bisector takes - come out as Toggles. Both sit outside the cluster, so you can adjust or flip them at any time.
- The construction, packaged as a cluster. Everything derived from those roots: the midpoints, tangents, intersections, booleans, and so on - is rebuilt as real nodes and wrapped into a single cluster named Macro. Open it to see or edit the inner wiring; leave it collapsed to keep the graph tidy.
- A Realize node per selected object. Each object you picked gets its own Realize node that materialises it back into the model: a clear one-to-one mapping, each one individually nameable.
Read left to right, the graph is: root points (+ sliders) -> the Macro cluster -> Realize.
The hand-drawn construction isn't destroyed. The objects you converted are hidden - tucked into a group called Converted Source, recoverable whenever you need it. Everything that stayed a live input - the root points, and any upstream the selection only referenced - stays visible and editable on the canvas, because that's what drives the new graph.
Convert to Nodes reproduces the same construction, not merely a working one. It preserves the choices your construction made - which crossing an intersection picked, an arc's winding direction, a tangent's side - so the rebuilt geometry lands exactly where the original did.
It handles the full range of drawing and construction tools - points, lines, rays, circles, arcs, ellipses, rectangles and squares, regions and booleans, gliders, reflections, midpoints and divisions, tangents and bisectors, even tick marks and reference images. Dimensions convert too, each one folding into its matching Dimension node, see below. Guides are not part of a construction's geometry, so they are simply left in place; and in the rare case something upstream still can't be rebuilt, Locus tells you clearly rather than converting only part of it.
- Run it from the command palette: it's a Modeling-window command.
- In two-window mode, combine the windows first; Convert to Nodes builds into the node graph and needs both windows together for now.
Convert to Nodes replaces the old Macro feature. Where you used to define and replay a construction macro, you now convert it into a live node graph - more flexible, and it plugs straight into everything else the node system can do.
A selected dimension used to stop the whole conversion. It now converts like anything else, folding into its matching node with its inputs planned out: end points, targets and edges become references or the rebuilt node that produced them.
- A linear dimension becomes Dimension: Linear, carrying its offset and its type.
- A three-point angular dimension becomes Dimension: Angle, carrying its radius and its reflex setting.
- A radial dimension becomes Dimension: Radial, carrying its diameter setting and its label distance.
Two forms have no ready-made point to reference, so Convert builds one:
- A radial dimension on a circle or arc takes its rim point from a Point on Curve glider on the target, with the leader angle exposed as a slider outside the node.
- A two-edge angular dimension takes the two edges' shared endpoint as its vertex, or an Intersection Points and Nearest Point pair when they do not share one, and each edge's endpoint on the measured side as an arm.
A radial dimension on a three-point circle, and a sector with no edge endpoint inside it, are the two cases Convert still reports rather than guessing.
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