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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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