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Glyph Composer

Tools → Glyph Composer… (Ctrl+G)

The Glyph Composer builds a hyperglyph — a small, deliberately designed hierarchy of nodes — by describing it one level at a time, with a live preview, and then drops it into your scene.

It is the hand-authoring counterpart to the Hyperglyph Generator, which rolls whole designs at random. Both write the same template .json, so a generated design can be opened here and edited level by level.

The model: one spec per level

A recipe is a list of levels, not a list of nodes. Level 0 is the Root; every level after it describes the children of the level above, and that one description is applied to every parent at that depth.

So a recipe with Root ×1 → Level 1 ×6 → Level 2 ×4 produces 1 + 6 + 24 = 31 nodes from three short descriptions. Node count grows as the running product of the counts, which is worth watching: three levels of ×10 is 1,110 nodes.

This is also the feature's main limitation. Because a level carries one specification, siblings at a given depth are identical apart from their position and their place in the color gradient. Per-branch variation isn't expressible.

Layout

  • Left — the Branch Levels list, with + Add Level and − Remove. Each row shows its count, geometry, and a ⌁ mark if the level has links.
  • Right — the parameter form for the selected level.
  • Bottom — a live preview viewport.
  • Footer — template name, Save/Load, preview controls, and the two ways out (Insert into Scene, Use as Draw Brush).

Per-level parameters

Basic

Field What it does
Count How many nodes at this level, per parent.
Geometry The glyph shape (Geometries).
Topology (child layout) The topology of this node — it decides how the next level's children are arranged around it (Topologies).
Ratio Topology-specific size: a torus's tube thickness, and similar.
Topo Scale The size of the coordinate system this node places its children in — see below.

Topo Scale and Auto

Topology Scale multiplies only the translate axes a topology reads as a distance, never the angular ones — so no value can distort a circular layout.

It matters here because the Composer describes child placement in one vocabulary: an Angular level always hands its children translate_x = 0–360. Under a Sphere, Torus or Cylinder parent that is a full revolution. Under a Cube, Pin, Plane or None parent it is 360 world units, which throws the children hundreds of parent-radii away, off screen and with no clue where they went.

Auto (on by default) resolves this: it picks the ANTz convention (1/180) exactly when a 0–360 sweep is about to be read as a distance, and 1:1 otherwise. The note under the checkbox tells you which is in force.

Touching the value, the slider, or either preset takes the level off Auto — the control you reached for is the decision, so you don't have to find the checkbox first. Re-check Auto to re-fit.

Older templates

A template saved before Topo Scale existed carries no value and loads onto Auto. That is what repairs the ones whose children were flying off — such a template regenerates as the corrected design rather than the smeared one.

Placement

The Root and the deeper levels offer different distributions, because a root has no parent to be arranged around.

Root placement modes:

Mode Parameters
Linear (along axis) Step, Axis (X/Y/Z)
Circular (world ring) Radius
Grid (world XY) Columns, Spacing X, Spacing Y
Random Bounds (±)

Child level placement modes:

Mode Parameters
Angular (ring around parent) Tilt / Latitude Y — the children's translate_y, read as latitude or tilt depending on the parent's topology. Altitude Offset Z — their translate_z, the altitude or radial offset off the parent's surface.
Linear (along axis) Step, Axis

Angular spaces the children evenly through the parent topology's angular coordinate, which is what produces rings, shells and spirals.

Transform

Scale X/Y/Z and Rotate X/Y/Z, applied to every node at the level, plus a Lock X/Y/Z checkbox that keeps the three scales equal. The lock persists as you switch levels.

Scale here is a local multiplier relative to the parent level. GlyphViz's renderer composes each level's scale with its parent's already-cascaded scale, so depth compounds once, at draw time — you do not need to pre-shrink each level yourself.

Color

A Color for the level, and an optional gradient to a second color spread across the siblings at that level.

Every level after the Root has a checkable Link to Parent group. Turning it on gives each node at that level a companion Link (type = 7) edge back to its parent, rendered as the chosen geometry stretched between the two — the same any-geometry links the viewer draws (see Geometry on a Link node).

  • Geometry — any glyph shape (Cylinder is the default), or the two classic line modes (Line, Prism). Mesh and Point are not offered.
  • Thickness — the link's ratio: its width on both cross-axes, in world units.
  • Use node color (default) — each link takes its child node's own gradient-resolved color. Uncheck it to give the level's links an independent color (with an optional sibling gradient) — e.g. wood-brown limbs under brightly colored canopy spheres.

For the links to be visible, the level needs a gap to span: give it some Altitude Offset Z in its Angular placement so children lift off their parent's surface. Parent and child then read as joints, and the links as the limbs between them — which is what turns a composed glyph into a jointed, branching structure (strings of pearls, trees with true branches, ball-and-stick molecules).

A level with links contributes two nodes per child, so it doubles that level's share of the node count.

The preview

Auto-preview rebuilds the glyph 350 ms after every edit. Preview Now forces a rebuild — pair it with Auto-preview off when a design gets large enough that the rebuild is noticeable.

The preview camera stays where you put it. Composing is an edit-and-look loop, and being yanked back to a distant overview every keystroke makes close-up work impossible, so re-framing is explicit:

  • Reset View (on the Preview header) re-frames on the whole glyph.
  • Loading a template re-frames, since it is a different glyph entirely.
  • The very first preview frames itself.

Getting the glyph out

Button Result
Insert into Scene Adds the generated nodes to the live scene. With a node selected, the glyph is inserted as its child; with nothing selected, at the scene root.
Use as Draw Brush Registers a snapshot of the template as the Draw Mode stamp and switches Draw Mode on — click or drag in the viewer to paint copies. Because it is a snapshot, further edits here don't change what an in-progress drawing stamps; press the button again to register the edited version.
Save Template… Writes the recipe as a .json.
Load Template… Opens one.

Saving scene data is unchanged: once a glyph is inserted, File → Save writes node CSVs like any other content.

Templates

A template is a small .json holding the level list — a few hundred bytes whatever the tree expands to. Templates come from three places:

Levels carry their link settings as link_geo (null = no links), link_ratio, link_color_start (null = inherit the node color) and link_color_end, and their scale fit as topo_scale / topo_scale_auto. Templates written before either feature existed load with links off and Topo Scale on Auto.

Large designs are awkward to edit here

Above roughly 2,000 nodes the Composer starts to feel sluggish, because Auto-preview regenerates and re-bakes the entire tree after every edit. The file is small and the glyph renders fine in a scene — it is editing that gets heavy. Turn off Auto-preview and use Preview Now, or lower the per-level counts.

Next step

Return to the Reference overview, or see the Hyperglyph Generator for the procedural way to arrive at a design worth editing here.