glossary

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Reference

Glossary

Plain-language definitions of the key terms you'll meet across Locus.

The terms you'll run into most often across the modeling canvas, the node graph, and the pattern tools.

Caution

Confirm against the build Locus is evolving quickly. A few of these terms describe features that are still being refined - confirm the exact behavior against the version you're running.

Terms

• Associative: the way Locus geometry stays connected to what defines it. Move a defining point and everything built on it updates, because the relationship is remembered rather than baked in.

• Bake: turn live, associative geometry into plain, standalone shapes that no longer update when their sources change. Useful when you want to freeze a result.

• Bridge: the link between the Modeling window and the Nodes window. It carries objects from the canvas into the node graph and materialized results back out.

• Cluster: a node that packages a whole sub-node graph inside a single node, drawn with a "stack of papers" look so it stands out. A way to tidy and reuse part of a node graph.

• Construction: your design as a living web of related geometry: the points, curves, and regions on the canvas together with the relationships that tie them.

• Detach: break a piece of geometry away from what was defining it, so it becomes independent and stops following its former source.

• Field: a distribution of values or directions across space that a pattern can respond to.

• Fundamental domain: the single tile of a repeating pattern. Copy it according to a wallpaper group and the copies fill the plane with no gaps or overlaps.

• Glider: a point pinned to a curve so it slides along that host instead of moving freely. Drop a point on a segment, circle, or arc and it binds to it.

• Managed geometry: shapes created for you by the bridge from the node graph. They're locked on the canvas and styled by their node, not edited by hand.

• Node: a single block in the Nodes node graph. Each node takes inputs, does one job, and passes results on through its sockets. See the data-type reference for what flows between them.

• Realize: materialize a node result into actual geometry on the modeling canvas.

• Reference: a live pointer to an existing object, so a node or another object can use it without copying it.

• Region: a filled, enclosed area (as opposed to an open curve). See the data-type reference.

• Seam: the line where two tiles or pieces of a pattern meet.

• Weld: merge points that sit on top of each other into one, so separate pieces join cleanly. Locus skips any merge that would break your construction.

• _rand: a naming tag for patterns that use controlled randomness. The variation is constrained inside a wallpaper group, so the overall result stays a strict repeating symmetry.

• Wallpaper group: one of the 17 mathematical ways a motif can repeat to tile a flat plane. Every Locus pattern maps to one of them.

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