Home > How Locus came to be

< Previous: Welcome | Next: Videos >

Getting Started

How Locus came to be

The path from a Blender experiment to a native, curve-exact geometry app.

For precise geometric constructions I used ZuL, René Grothmann's Zirkel und Lineal, Compass and Ruler in English. I would export the vectors and then work with them in Illustrator.

Locus began with a decision: to take the wallpaper symmetry groups seriously as a way to drive design for fabrication. The open question was what to build it in.

When I got serious about this current line of work, I started in my favorite 3D program, Blender, using its geometry nodes. It got the symmetry working - but the moment I moved to curved shapes, the limits of a vertex/edge/face model showed. A mesh can only ever approximate a curve, and even simple parametric curves weren't really possible.

So I rewrote the symmetry systems in Rhino and Grasshopper. That solved most of the geometry, but the tool itself felt slow and clunky - powerful, yet never quite suited to clean geometric work.

Eventually I started over from scratch and built Locus as its own program - and that's where it is today: a fast native app for Mac and Windows, with exact line-and-arc geometry all the way through.

The last piece came from thinking about who might use it. Not everyone speaks English - so instead of leaning on words, I built the icon-based interface Locus has now, where the tools speak in pictures.

< Previous: Welcome | Next: Videos >

Related

• Welcome to Locus Studio: what it is and how the two windows fit together.