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Getting Started

Welcome to Locus Studio

What Locus Studio is, who it's for, and how its two windows fit together.

Locus Studio is an application for designing geometric patterns parametrically. It was built from scratch to replace a patchwork of general-purpose design tools with a single application that speaks the language of geometry directly - exact construction, symmetry and clean vector output.

The two-window idea

Everything in Locus lives in one of two workspaces, and they're linked live:

• The Modeling window is a dynamic-geometry canvas. You place points and build with segments, lines, rays, circles, arcs, bisectors, tangents, and booleans - each one a real construction that stays editable. Drag a defining point and everything built from it updates.

• The Nodes window is a visual dataflow node graph, hand-built on canvas. Typed sockets carry data along wires from node to node - a slider into a circle radius, a grid into an array - and the result materializes back into the Modeling window.

You'll move between them constantly. A good mental model: the Modeling window is where you draw and decide; the Nodes window is where you parameterize and repeat.

What it's for

The end goal is finished, usable pattern. Locus knows about the 17 wallpaper symmetry groups, can scatter tiles under controlled randomness, and can drive geometry from an image to make halftone-style fields... and much much more. Finished designs export as SVG - clean, exact vector paths, ready to use in any tool that reads vectors.

What geometry looks like here

Locus keeps geometry as exact lines and arcs, not polylines approximating curves. Its booleans return true arcs from union, intersect, and difference. In practice that means corners meet where they should and curves stay smooth at any zoom - which matters for any precise output.

Where to go next

• Installing & launching: get the app running.
• A tour of the interface: what's on screen.
• Your first pattern: a full walkthrough.
• Core concepts: the ideas the rest of the manual assumes.

Related

• Community & support: ask questions, share your work, and get a license.

Next: How Locus came to be >