Material author

You draw where the lines go. The family decides what they are.

Material

Family

Language

View

Zoom

Edit

—

Tool

Pen hold the pen over the slab to read it

Gauge

Roughness

Breaks

Minor veins

Deflection

Geological fold

Variant

Variant amount

Layers

Colour

Tiles & floor

Tiles

Tile size

Grout

Kerf

Edge

Layout Units

Boards

Sections

Graft branch from

Lay tiles cuts the slab you drew into a repeating pattern and lays it on a floor. Grout is the gap between tiles; kerf is the material the cut removes, so the veins drift a little across each joint. In order keeps the veins running from tile to tile; Shuffled cuts each tile from a random part of the slab. In wood, Boards is how many different cuts of the one log the floor is made from — at 1 it is a single board repeated, higher walks down the cant so neighbouring rows are neighbouring boards, and a high count with Shuffled and a herringbone or Cairo pattern gives a mosaic. Keep this cut saves the board you are looking at; once anything is kept the floor is laid from the kept cuts instead, and each of those may be a different tree entirely. Plank run is the one layout that is not a repeating pattern: rows of boards of differing lengths with their end joints staggered. The plank is the board you cut — its width and its longest length come from the Plank controls above, not from Size — so Plank length is a nominal that Length variation scatters around, and Joint stagger is how far each row's joints shift from the row below. At zero they stack into columns, which is exactly what a floor is laid to avoid. Tap a tile edge with Chip to knock a corner off. Sizes are on an 8×5 ft slab.

Floor planks

Plank width

Plank length

Length variation

Mitre angle

Joint stagger

These shape the plank-run pattern and nothing else — board length, how much the lengths differ, and how far each row’s joints shift from the row below. How many boards the floor is cut from is Boards, under Tiles & floor, and that one applies to every pattern.

Coat & light

Crossfade: blend between two stops you pick, ignoring everything between them. Sweeping the spectrum walks the whole line, so stops at −1, 0 and +1 mean 0 interrupts a −1 → +1 move; this asks each artifact how it looks at each end and mixes those two answers.

Crossfade

Spotlight

Lens type

Clouds & warp

Clouds

Cloud scale

Warp

Deep drift

Cloud X

Cloud Y

Warp holds

Banding

Bands

Angle

Waviness

Breccia

Clasts

Matrix

Drusy

Crystal size

Sparkle

Drusy colours

Drusy variants

Fog & resin

To sculpt the haze: select the Fog layer, then use Gravity (push clears a window, pull pools) or Magnet.

Glass

Formed by

Poured into

Cell width W

Cell length L

Blob scatter

Ribbon roundness

Press from

Glass is a colour field and a list of warps. Colour is poured into a mould — strips, or radial wedges — left to set part-way, and only then worked. Nothing mixes, because each colour went into its own compartment and was already stiff: they fold past each other and stay themselves, and where two lap the light crosses both, so the seam goes darker rather than blending. THE ORDER OF THE LIST IS THE POINT. A stir then a blow stretches what the stick dragged; a blow then a stir drags an already-blown sheet. Those are different sheets, and the forming buttons are starting points you can then reorder, not modes you are inside. Spin drags the outside round more than the centre, blow spreads everything from the centre, roll stretches one way and squeezes the other, and stir is the Moon tool dragged across the slab. An empty list is a plain pour, which is a real sheet. What the field really holds is THICKNESS: the optical path makes the tint, and because green survives where red and blue do not, a thick sheet goes green — the same reason you see it down the edge. Opacity decides how much of that thickness shows through at all. Pane across and Pane down choose where in the formed object this pane was cut, the same idea as choosing where in a log to take a board. There is no scene behind the slab yet, so nothing is refracted through it; the slope is the honest cue until there is one.

Then, in order

Canes

Cane colours

Cane count

Cane wander

Cane lay-up

Gather twist

Cane overlap

Thickness

Iron tint

Pane across

Pane down

Disc radius

Ream

Ream scale

Flute pitch

Flute depth

Seeds

Seed stretch

Inclusions

Opacity

Relief

Wood

Species

A species is a row of numbers, not a mode. Pressing one writes every control below and the three wood colours, and you carry on dragging from there. These are eyeballed starting points informed by wood anatomy, not measurements — the place measured ring widths would land is exactly here.

The cut

On the Log view you can simply drag the cut: a stroke across the section is the plank, and it sets all four of these at once. Nothing here stores a board. There is one log, and Cut is where the saw plane stands relative to its axis: near zero is quartersawn and straight, wider is rift, wider still is plainsawn and the rings open into cathedral arches. Board position slides along that plane, which is why one board changes character across its own width.

Cut

Board position

Glaze

Plank width

Plank length

Board, inches ×

Cut angle

The tree

A tree grows upward as well as outward, so a ring laid down when the leader was at thirty feet does not exist at a hundred and fifty — the wood up there is only the rings added after the apex passed it. That is what makes a trunk narrow toward the top: not thinner rings, but FEWER of them. Taper is how hard the leader's climb tracks the year it was growing in. Height is put on a year at a time, and the increment comes from that same year's ring — so the drought that pinched a ring also stalled the leader, from one climate signal rather than two inventions. Zero is the perfect cylinder — the leader was always at full height, so every ring runs the whole stem. Raise it and the climb slows: a half gives the straight cone, and towards one the leader creeps up a few feet a year while the radius is laid down early, so the butt gathers far more rings than the top and the stem comes to a point. Height up trunk is where this board was cut, and because a board spans a range of heights it really does cross wood of different ages.

Trunk height

Taper

Basal flare

Flare height

Height up trunk

Tree size

Growth

Rings

Latewood contrast

These are the numbers a species actually differs by. Juvenile is how wide the first rings are, Settles how fast that fades, and Mature the width it lands on. Scatter is year-to-year variation; Bad years is how often a pinched run comes and how deep. Latewood is what fraction of each ring is the dark band and Edge how abruptly it starts — a fir has a narrow, violently sharp band and a maple a soft, almost invisible one.

Juvenile

Settles

Mature

Scatter

Bad years

How bad

Bad years young

Bad years middle

Bad years old

Latewood

Latewood edge

Colour

Colour walks outward from the pith instead of being drawn fresh for each ring, so neighbouring rings are nearly the same and rings two centuries apart can be a different wood. Drift is how far it wanders, Drift scale how many rings it takes to get there. The two ends are tokens: open the Colour editor to set the earlywood and latewood colours.

Colour drift

Drift scale

Heartwood is the second timeline. Growth says when wood formed; this says what happened to it afterwards. Conversion is counted in rings inward from the bark rather than as a fraction of the radius, because a species carries roughly a fixed number of sapwood rings however fast it grew. Sapwood is how many stay pale, Conversion how abrupt the front is.

Sapwood

Conversion

Figure

Ribbon, curl and quilt are not ring effects — they are fibre direction, and they are optical rather than geometric. Wood reflects far more light along the fibre than across it, so where fibres dive into the cut face it reads dark and where they lie along it, light. Figure is how strongly that shows at all. Spiral is a steady helical wind about the trunk; Interlock is the same angle alternating its sign every few years, which is what mahogany is; Curl is a transverse undulation, which is fiddleback. Turn the light angle and the ribbon reverses — that is the tell that it is modelled rather than painted, and end grain shows none of it because every fibre meets that surface square on.

Figure

Spiral

Interlock

Interlock period

Curl

Curl rate

Mineral stain

Streak width

Streak spacing

Bird's eye

A bird's eye is not a mark on the surface. It is a small dimple in the cambium that the tree keeps re-making in the same spot year on year, so it runs outward as a needle pointing at the pith. Cut across those needles on a flatsawn face and you see the eyes; cut along them and you see almost nothing, which is why bird's eye hides on quartersawn. Eyes is how strongly they show, Spacing how far apart they sit and Size how wide each one is — both in INCHES, a real bird's eye being about a fifth of an inch across; Spacing is measured one foot out from the pith, so eyes crowd together towards the centre and spread apart towards the bark — a bigger tree carries more of them, not wider-spaced ones. Depth is how far the rings dip into it, counted in RING WIDTHS — at 2.4 two or three ring boundaries curve into each eye, which is what draws those little contour circles. The dimple is a cone rather than a soft well, so those circles come out evenly spaced.

Eyes

Eye spacing

Eye size

Eye depth

The pith

The pith is a curve, not a line, and that is what stops straight grain rendering as ruled lines. Lean moves it along the saw plane, so the stripes breathe wider and tighter; Wander moves it across the board, so they bend up and down. Each has a slow term and a ripple on top of it.

Pith lean

Lean ripple

Pith wander

Wander ripple

Waves

Rings are circles until this is turned up. Eccentricity is how far they bulge off round, and it ACCUMULATES: a bulge grown in year 60 is still in the surface at year 220, because every later ring was laid on top of it. From and Over say which years it came on. Direction aims it, Breadth sets how much of the trunk it covers. This is the thing a branch, a lean or a buried wound all need.

The wave family is what makes a tree a species rather than a setting. Three waves round the trunk and along it, shared by every axis the tree has — branches included, which is why a knot looks like it came from this tree. Out of round is how far they push, Lobes how many swellings go round the trunk, Travel how fast they move along it. An interference year is a kink in the family rather than a second mechanism: Anchor is when, Over how long, and To what the amplitude becomes. It ramps, because a step reads as an edit and a ramp reads as growth, and nothing before the anchor moves.

Out of round

Lobes

Travel

Anchor year

Anchor over

Anchor to

Swelling

Eccentricity

Direction

Breadth

From ring

Over

The branch

The second feature is a branch rather than a second lean, and the only difference is that it has a place along the trunk. At indicates where, Reach how far it carries either side. Walk the board past it and the grain sweeps around the branch and then straightens again, because outside the window the feature is not there at all.

Branch swell

Branch side

Branch breadth

Reach

Branch from ring

Branch over

Everything above draws wood around the branch. Knot draws the branch itself, where the plane went through it rather than past it: its rings are concentric about the branch and so run crosswise to the trunk's. It is a cone widening outward, because the branch gained a ring every year the trunk grew around it, which is why a knot is small on an inner board and large near the bark. Pitch is how tight its own rings are. Died at ring is the difference between the two kinds of knot: a living branch reaches the bark and its wood joins the trunk's, so the knot is sound and on every board; a dead one stops there and is grown over, trapping bark at its edge, so it is black, it falls out of a board, and it is only in the wood laid down before it was buried.

Knot

Knot pitch

Died at ring

Taken off

Branch rise

Fire

A drought is a bad year everywhere at once — the whole ring narrows and the tree carries on. A fire is not that. It kills the cambium on ONE SIDE, and that sector simply stops while the rest of the tree keeps growing, rolls in from both edges of the wound and years later closes over it. What is left buried is a lens of frozen surface with a charred face, which is why fire history can be read off a stump. Fire year is when it burned, zero for never; Severity is how much of the cambium went; Reach is how far up the butt the scar climbs, so a board from higher up the same trunk has no fire in it; and Heal is how many rings the surviving wood took to close over — the longer that is, the deeper the scar is buried and the wider the lens you cut through.

Fire year

Fire severity

Fire width

Fire face

Heal

Fire reach

Calibrate the pen

Twenty short strokes teach the studio your hand: the pressure you actually use, how you normally hold the pen, and what counts as fast for you. Nothing is drawn on the slab while you calibrate, and nothing leaves this device.

File

Render

Tile: the planner races candidate sizes and picks one. Probe measures which sizes this device can actually paint at the chosen width - it allocates each one, marks its far corner and reads it back, which is how a canvas that silently stops painting is caught. Only sizes that pass are offered. On a device short of memory it is often worth taking one size BELOW what the planner settles on: a large tile can lose light at the joins in a way a single calibration tile cannot show, and on the slowest hardware here the smaller tile was also the faster one. A suggestion, not a rule — it costs a capable machine speed for nothing.

Tile

Glow lift: under black light each element draws its own halo, and this mixes that halo toward white (or, negative, toward black). Auto uses the value measured for this browser engine so a set rendered across machines agrees. Turn Auto off to leave it deliberately — engine character is a choice, not a fault.

Glow lift

Glow

Auto

How the tools read

Settings apply to your next line. Lines already down keep the settings they were drawn with. Pen pressure and tilt are among them: with pressure on, how hard you press sets a vein’s width along its length and a pour’s flow; with tilt on, leaning the pen further than you normally hold it softens the vein’s edge along its length.

Each line keeps what it was made with. Its family and its settings are fixed when you draw it, so changing them shapes the next line only. This generates the base structure; the colours here are only a preview, and on a real layer the colour is yours to set. Pinch or use + and − to zoom; a minor vein grown while zoomed in comes out shorter, at the scale you are working.

Granite. Granite lays a ground of specks that bunch but never touch. Gravity moves them: tap for a point, drag for a line; pull gathers them into clusters or bands, push clears space. A vein drawn through granite pushes the specks aside and bends them with it — crowded on the inside of a turn, thinned on the outside — and dense specks can deflect it a few degrees, never more. Only specks already down are moved, so what you draw first is older rock.

Magnet. The pen is a bar magnet and the specks are iron filings. Its angle is the magnet's axis: held upright the field leaves the tip and fans the specks out from it; laid over, it combs them along the way the pen leans. Slow passes align harder; Scatter breaks alignment up. With Pressure on, pressing harder brings the magnet closer. A finger or mouse, with no angle to read, aims the magnet along the way it moves. Hover traces lets a pen or mouse work lightly from above the slab. The Angle view colours every speck by the way it points, so alignment shows as a single colour.

Identity shows what an animation would read: each line in its own colour, brightening along its length in the direction you drew it; web cracks brighten toward the line that spread them. Nothing had to be traced — the line was known when it was made.

The three families are starting points set by eye, not yet measured from the harvested stones.