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The Nodes Window

How the node graph works

Understand nodes, sockets, wires, and live evaluation in Locus Studio.

In Locus Studio you build a pattern by wiring together small building blocks called nodes. Each node does one job - makes a number, rotates a shape, gathers items into a list - and you connect them so that the result of one feeds into the next. The whole arrangement is your recipe, and it stays live: change one value and everything that depends on it updates.

Nodes and sockets

Every node has input sockets on its left and output sockets on its right. Wires carry a value out of one node's output and into another node's input. An input holds a single wire - connecting a new one replaces whatever was there before. When an input has no wire, it falls back to the value you type into it directly, so many nodes are usable without wiring anything in.

Connections can't loop back on themselves. The node graph always flows forward, from sources toward results.

Typed sockets and wires

Sockets are typed so that only compatible things connect, and Locus encodes the type into how the socket and wire look: each type has its own color and shape, a wire is drawn in the color of the type it carries, and a wire's thickness tells you how many things it's carrying - thin for a single value, thick (a translucent casing around a solid core) for a whole list. An any socket adopts the live type of whatever flows through it, so you can trace what any wire carries just by looking.

The full legend - every socket color and shape, and the thin-vs-fat wire - is on the Sockets & wires page.

Getting geometry in and out

Nodes work with abstract values, so your drawn geometry has to cross into the node graph and back. A Reference node pulls a shape from your model into the node graph as something the nodes can operate on, and a Realize step sends the node graph's result back out into your model as finished geometry. See Realize and Reference for how that hand-off works.

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