There are lots of common issues that plague artistic workflows, and with this first tool we hope to give you an idea of what it looks like to solve such problems in GraphN.

The problem we're going to be solving today is the following: Create a tool that selects hard edges.

First, open up GraphN and you'll see the homepage. When working with the software, I like to have my 3d software (Maya in this case) on the side, either by splitting my screen in two if it's wide enough, or just putting it in a separate window.

If you look at the homepage, there's an image with the text CREATE A NEW PROJECT that does exactly what it says, but before that, make sure that you're under the Autodesk Maya Context, which is where you should be if you want to create tools for Autodesk Maya.

If this is your first time starting GraphN and you click on CREATE A NEW PROJECT, you'll be greeted asking you to simply drag and drop the Polygonflow logo to the Maya viewport. That's all you need to do to install it :)

And now the real magic happens: as soon as you've dropped the canvas, GraphN installs its Maya integration along with the Tools Library, and from there you can create whatever nodes you want, connect them to the Compute Graph node and either press CTRL+R or click the triangular PLAY icon in the top-right corner to run the graph.

You can add as many nodes as you want just by hitting SPACE or TAB and typing in their name. Want to bevel something? Type bevel. Want to scatter something? You know the drill.

Now as you might have seen here, my cube was teeeny tiny, and I want to scale it up. We can do that by going to the Properties Editor and adjusting the cube's depth, width and height.

Now as you can see, I had to type some values in all three properties, which can be quite time consuming when you have multiple nodes like this to tweak. This is where the node Values comes into play. This node provides a wide range of data types that you can use throughout your graph. Since a cube's dimensions are expressed in floats, we simply set the Values node's type to float, then start playing with its value.