Node families & graph colours
Every node belongs to a family, and the family sets its header colour.
The families
Each node sits in exactly one family. The family tints the node's title bar and groups it in the Tab palette.
| Family | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Generate | New content built from parameters: shapes, text, meshes, noise, curves and gradients. Also the scene fixtures, cameras, lights, the environment and Render Settings. The sources a graph starts from. |
| Modify | Changes to existing content: transforms, effects, deform, booleans, compositing, materials, simulation, and the render and rasterise nodes. The bulk of a graph. |
| Data | Values and logic: maths, comparisons, conditionals, tables and arrays, conversions, loops, and the readers that pull values back out of geometry. |
| IO | The outside world in and back out again: files, images and video, capture devices, MIDI, OSC, DMX and serial, the computer-vision nodes, and export. |
| Structure | The graph itself: subgraphs and their In and Out terminals, routers, annotations, and the graph-level Canvas and Score. Content passes through unchanged. |
| Plugin | Nodes added by an installed plugin, plus the built-ins that host outside code such as Lua, p5, Hydra and audio plugins. |
Two placements catch people out. Maths and logic are Data, not Modify. The Render node is Modify, while Render Settings is Generate.
The automatic converters spliced in between mismatched types are internal plumbing and never appear in the palette. Only nodes from the families above can be placed. They do surface in one read-only place: the data viewer's implicit-conversion chip. See Automatic conversion.
Reading a graph by colour
A row of Generate headers feeding a long run of Modify headers into an IO export is the common pipeline shape. Clusters of Data colour off to one side are usually the logic driving everything else.
Give a node a custom colour to mark out your own sections by eye. Reset to Family Color puts it back. See Node controls.
Pin and wire colours
Each pin is coloured by the type of data it carries, so a wire's colour says what is flowing without a click.
Blue for numbers, booleans, vectors, signals and transforms.
Pink for colour data: colours, gradients, and gaussian splats in a duller shade.
Teal for point collections and distance fields.
Amber for curves, and gold for materials.
Lavender for other fields, and purple for raster and volume sequences.
Lights, the environment and the render settings each carry a colour of their own.
A polymorphic pin has no one colour. It cycles through the colours of the types it accepts while idle, and settles on the matching one while you drag a wire at it.
Matching colours mean the types line up. Mismatched ones usually still connect, with an automatic conversion inserted.
Pin shapes
Shape is the second dimension.
Round carries a single value. Most pins are these.
Diamond carries array-shaped data: a numeric array, a point or splat collection, a distance field, or a sequence of fields.
Capsule takes several wires at once.
Shape follows the type's array flavour rather than a general sense of quantity, so a Curve pin and a plain Collection pin are both round even though each carries many items.
See also
The node graph for placing and wiring nodes
Search & the node palette for the Tab palette
Node controls for custom colour against family colour
What flows on the wires for what the pin colours represent