Neris

Carved bands are everywhere once you start looking — along a plinth, around a doorway, down the cheek of a stair — and almost nobody can say what separates one from the next. Neris turns that into something you can work out rather than guess at. Set a module cell by cell on a squared ground and the engine repeats it in front of you, names the symmetry that repeat belongs to, and gives you the figures a carver would want: the repeat period, how much of the band is ground, the run of groove per metre, and whether the module turns a corner without a unit being cut. Where a line breaks its own grammar, Neris names the fault and says how to close it. Twenty band families sit in the atlas to measure yours against, each with the grounds that suit it and the tools that cut it. Photograph a band you have found, lay the same grid over the photograph, trace it cell by cell, and Neris ranks the atlas against what you traced, giving a reason for every candidate it rules out. Neris works all of it out on the device, and nothing leaves it but the plate you choose to keep. What you can do: set a module and read its symmetry, measure it against twenty families, trace a band off your own photograph, keep your work as numbered plates, watch the figures gather on the register, and save an ornament plate straight to your photos.