Add-in for Autodesk Fusion
See the structure behind your design.
Play With Ingenuity
Most CAD tools focus on geometry.
Node Atlas focuses on the relationships that generate it.
Running inside Autodesk Fusion, it transforms your design into a live dependency graph.
Parameters, sketches, features, bodies and components, and the connections between them.
Understand what drives your model, what depends on what, and how decisions propagate.
One-time purchase. No subscription.
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A design is a living structure
Most CAD systems present a design as geometry. But geometry is only the visible result of something deeper: a network of relationships, constraints, parameters and decisions.
Node Atlas makes that structure visible. As a design develops, recognizable constellations begin to emerge. A fretboard. A neck. A body. Not as geometry, but as patterns of dependency and influence.
Experienced designers often think this way already.
They reason about systems, consequences and relationships.
The atlas externalizes that mental model, allowing you to work directly with the structure of a design while it is still alive and evolving.
What follows are five patterns the atlas is built on.
Each begins with a problem every parametric designer knows, and ends with what the atlas does about it.
PATTERN ONE
The Visible Structure
A parametric design is a web of relationships, but the timeline presents it as a sequence of operations. What you cannot see, you cannot reason about.
Therefore: render the design as a graph. Every parameter, sketch, feature and body becomes a node; every dependency becomes an edge you can follow.
PATTERN TWO
Recognizable Constellations
Designers rarely think in individual features. They think in subsystems: a fretboard, a neck, a body.
Yet CAD often scatters those relationships across sketches, parameters and timeline operations.
Therefore: gather related nodes into centers and constellations — coherent regions of the graph that reveal how a subsystem is organized and how it relates to the larger design.
PATTERN THREE
Edit Where You See
Understanding a feature in one place and editing it in another breaks the thread of thought.
Therefore: edit feature parameters directly from the graph — extrude distances, fillet radii, pattern counts, across seven feature types — and let every change write straight to the Fusion timeline.
PATTERN FOUR
Follow Every Consequence
In a connected system, no change is local. The true cost of an edit is everything that depends on it.
Therefore: trace upstream to see what feeds a feature, and downstream to see everything it touches, before you change anything.
▶ youtube.com/shorts/-OuEklA6upo
PATTERN FIVE
Patterns That Run
The knowledge inside a good design usually dies with the file it lives in.
Therefore: package an operation — a Python script, an f3d, and the parameters that drive it — as a Script Node. Run it with new inputs, export it, import it, and build a library of design knowledge that outlives any single document.
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Using the atlas
First, add Node Atlas to Fusion. It appears as its own command in the solid modification ribbon.
Then, open the atlas. It reads your design's timeline and parameters and lays them out as a dependency graph, grouped around the features that anchor your model.
From there, tweak parameters from the inspector, execute Script Nodes with new inputs, and refresh the graph to see the updated state of your design.
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Design intent made visible
Node Atlas began while building and teaching parametric instrument design at Contriver Guitars.
The challenge was never creating geometry. The challenge was understanding the structure that produced it.
A fretboard is not just a collection of sketches and features.
A neck is not just a sequence of operations.
Each is a living structure made from relationships that depend on one another.
This is how many experienced designers already think. Not in isolated operations, but in systems. Not in features, but in consequences.
Over time, those structures become recognizable. A fretboard has a shape. A neck has a shape. Not in geometry, but in the graph itself.
Node Atlas was created to make those relationships visible, navigable and reusable — to let you work with the structure of a design while it is still alive and evolving.
Fusion remains the geometric execution layer. Node Atlas provides the map.
Whether you build instruments, products, furniture, fixtures or mechanical systems, the atlas helps answer a deeper question than “What is this design?” It helps answer “How does this design work?”
Contriver Node Atlas
$79.99
- The full Node Atlas add-in for Autodesk Fusion
- Live dependency graph of your timeline and parameters
- In-graph parameter editing across seven feature types
- Script Nodes with library, ZIP export and import
Instant download after checkout, delivered by Gumroad.
Questions
Short answers to the things people ask first.
Will it modify my design without asking?
No. Node Atlas reads your timeline to build the graph.
Nothing changes until you explicitly edit a parameter or run a Script Node. Edits go
through Fusion's standard API, so they show up in your timeline like changes
you made by hand.
What exactly is a Script Node?
A reusable package of a Fusion Python operation, f3d, and the
parameters that drive it.
You run it from the graph with the inputs you choose,
and you can export it as a ZIP to reuse in other designs or share with others.
Do I need to know how to code?
Not for the core of the product — the graph, inspector and parameter editing are fully visual. Writing your own Script Nodes takes some Fusion Python, but you can also import nodes that others have built.
What do I need to run it?
A current installation of Autodesk Fusion. Node Atlas runs inside Fusion as an add-in — there's nothing else to install and no separate account.