Interface Tour

The application has two main screens: the Project Hub, where you manage and open projects, and the editor, where you build materials. This page is a quick orientation; each section links to a page with the full detail.

Project Hub

The Project Hub is the first interactive screen after the splash. It shows your projects as cards grouped into shelves (Recents, Favorites, your own shelves, and a Library of everything), with search and tag filtering above them. A sidebar holds New Project, Open File, Settings, a What’s New card and community links. Opening a project replaces the hub with the editor; Back to Hub returns you. See Project Hub.

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The Project Hub with the sidebar, the Recents carousel and the Library grid visible.

Toolbar

A fixed strip across the top of the editor window: one row of card buttons with a search field stretched across the middle. To the left of the field are Settings, Back to Hub, Save, Undo and Redo; to the right are annotation mode, the minimap, Zoom In, the zoom field, Zoom Out, focus mode and Import. Every button carries a screen-reader label, and the ones that toggle a mode stay lit while that mode is on. See Editor Layout for the full button table.

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The editor toolbar: the left button cluster, the search field, and the right cluster with the zoom field between the zoom buttons.

Search

The search field in the toolbar searches two things at once. Nodes match on name and description; drag a result onto the canvas to place it where you drop it, or tap it to place it at the center of the viewport. Documentation results open the manual over the editor, so looking something up does not mean leaving the graph. Nodes are listed first, documentation under it, capped at five articles.

An empty query lists the whole node catalog and no articles. With nothing matching, the panel reads No matches. Escape clears the field and closes the panel.

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The search drop-down open under the toolbar, showing the Nodes group above the Documentation group.

The manual

Search is the only way into the manual; Settings has no Documentation page. An article opens as a card over the editor with three controls: Back, which appears once you have followed a cross-link and is labeled with the article you came from; Open on the web, which opens the same page on the website in your browser; and a close button. Escape walks back up the cross-links you followed, then closes the reader.

The manual is not shipped inside the app. It downloads from the website the first time the app is online and is cached on disk, so it stays current without an app update, and every launch after that works fully offline. Only a device that has never been online has no manual: search offers no articles, and an article says so rather than failing.

Illustrations are fetched per image as you read them, not up front, so they only use the space you actually look at. Settings → Library → Documentation shows what is cached, offers Download All Illustrations with the total size on the button, and can remove them again.

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An article open in the reader over the editor, with the Open on the web and close controls in its header.

Canvas

The canvas is the central area where the node graph lives: nodes, wires, comments and annotations. The zoom field in the toolbar reflects the canvas zoom, and collapsing panels gives their space to the canvas. See Canvas.

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The canvas with a small node graph connected to an output node.

Panel slots and panel types

There are exactly three panel slots: left, right and bottom. Six panel types can be assigned to any slot, so where each panel lives is your choice, not a fixed location: Node Picker, Properties, Materials, Preview 2D, Preview 3D, and Globals. All six render real content. See Editor Layout for slot assignment and persistence.

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The editor with all three panel slots populated, each showing a different panel type.

Tabs

Each slot has a header with a tab bar, a + button and a collapse chevron. Tapping a tab switches the active view; + opens a Panel Views sheet where you pin or unpin any of the six types to that slot. The last remaining tab in a slot cannot be unpinned.

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A panel header with several tabs and the Panel Views sheet open.

Collapsing and focus mode

The chevron in a panel header collapses that slot, and a collapsed slot gives its entire area to the canvas; a small floating pill on the canvas edge expands it again. Focus mode (Ctrl+↑ or Cmd+↑, or the toolbar button) slides all three panels out and collapses the toolbar, leaving a single Exit Focus Mode pill.

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The editor in focus mode, showing only the canvas and the Exit Focus Mode pill.

Resizing

Drag the handle on a panel’s inner edge; the panel tracks the pointer exactly and snaps to a whole pixel on release. Sizes are stored as percentages of the window, so the layout scales when you resize or move between monitors. One layout is kept for all projects, per user, and restored on every editor launch. Limits and defaults are listed in Editor Layout.