FAQ
Answers to the questions that come up in the first week with DNA.
Animation and time
How do I animate a parameter? Press K with the node graph or the timeline focused. Move the playhead and change the value again. Values interpolate between keyframes. Right-clicking the timeline ruler also offers Set Keyframe; right-clicking a parameter does not. See Keyframing. For value-driven motion instead of keyframes, type = in the field to write a Parameter expressions.
How do I make my graph cook every frame? Anything time-based drives the graph while the transport plays: $T, a simulation, a live input. Check the cook badge on a node that looks frozen. See Cook policy.
Why won't my simulation move? Press play. Paused, a simulation holds the frame it is on, and stepping forward one frame while paused does not advance it. Scrubbing backward or jumping forward re-simulates the frames in between, up to four per cook. More in Simulation.
Nothing on screen
My node's output disappeared. First suspects: the node is Bypassed (press B to toggle), another node is Soloed, opacity is at zero, or layer scope is hiding it. See Node controls and Gotchas.
I wired my cube into a Rasterize and the cube vanished. That is by design: a node whose result is consumed downstream stops drawing on its own, so you see the rasterised card instead of both. Its opacity is set to zero for you when the wire is made. Drag that opacity back up to 1 and the cube draws again alongside the card. Opacity zero is a hide rather than a fade, so it stops the live viewport draw only; anything capturing that node, a Rasterize included, still sees it at full strength.
I wired a field into the viewport and see nothing. Colour fields and record fields draw on their own. A scalar field draws only if it has a closed form and its show_slice toggle is on. Vector fields and morph fields draw nothing, so those are the ones that need sampling onto geometry or rendering through a node that wants pixels. See Fields and Rasterizing.
My shape went blurry when I scaled it up. That is a raster image hitting its fixed resolution. Keep the shape analytic to hold sharp at any zoom: the analytical toggle is on by default on the 2D shape nodes and off on the mesh primitives. See Analytic shapes.
Performance
Why is playback slow? Usually one expensive node recooking constantly. Hover output sockets to find the node with the highest cook time, then freeze it, lower authored resolutions, or reduce counts. See The performance panel and Making it faster.
Export and playback
How do I export? Open the Export panel (Cmd+E), pick a target, set range and quality, and render. See Exporting and Video & image export.
Video, image and Web App exports ship today. Audio export cannot start: the encoders are written, but the export path never asks the engine for an audio plan and fails immediately. Audio-plugin, standalone-app and embedded targets are not finished either, and the browser runtime has no audio. See Exporting.
How do I play a finished piece outside the editor? The only bundle you can produce today is the project.ntbundle inside a Full App web export. The DNA Player opens that file on the desktop and gives you the exposed parameters; it has no live I/O, and no bundle carries audio. See The player.
Reuse
How do I reuse a setup across projects? Select the nodes and choose Save Selection as Node…, which writes a node type you can drop into another project. Collapsing to a subgraph with Cmd+G is a graph-organising move: a subgraph you collapse yourself lives in the project and is not written to the asset library. See Subgraphs and Reusable subgraphs.