Effects

As the name suggests, the Effects family provides tools for manipulating the appearance of any renderable figure—whether it’s a shape, image, or frame buffer. Nodalin borrows a concept from SwiftUI, where effects act as modifiers applied directly to figures.

Unlike typical image filters that simply alter pixels, Nodalin’s Effects operate on live, procedural shapes. This means the geometric and property data of the input remain accessible to subsequent nodes in the chain.

This design has two creative implications unique to Nodalin. First, effects can be chained together to create complex visualizations while preserving the properties of their input shapes. In other words, an effect node doesn’t flatten its input into a simple texture.

In the following example, a Circle node is connected to a Trail effect node, and the chain continues with a Square node — resulting in an instanced set of four circles leaving a trail. The effect is applied to the circles themselves, without breaking the output chain.

All Effect nodes output a value of the datatype Figure which contains coordinates, rotation and other properties required for renderable elements. This convention makes Source and Effect nodes fully compatible.

Upcoming effects include Displace, Dither, Kaleidoscope, and Data Mosh, which are currently in active development.