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I have been searching on the web and I can't find this. What is the meaning of the color of the node sockets in the node editor?

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  • Grey is a single value

  • Yellow is a tuple containing 3 values; the red, green, and blue channels of a color.

  • Purple is a tuple containing 3 values. Used for vector/coordinate information.

  • Green is a shader closure, representing a description of how light will interact with a surface or volume. This one can only be connected into other green sockets.

Note that these will be converted to/from each other automatically as much as possible:

  • Yellow and purple can be connected to each other without any loss of information (under the hood they are pretty much the same).

  • Grey can be connected to yellow or purple without any loss of information (all three values in the tuple will the same value)

  • Yellow and purple can be connected to gray, but will be converted to a single grayscale value:

enter image description here

More info on this link:

Cycles - (Shader) Nodes - inputs outputs - What are the exact data types?

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    $\begingroup$ I would say that it's blue, not purple, but maybe that's just my color scheme (#6363c7).. And I would summarize the blue nodes as "vector/coordinate" information since they are used for UV and normal information. $\endgroup$ – Mutant Bob Jul 13 '15 at 21:32
  • $\begingroup$ @MutantBob Mine are the same color, but for whatever reason they look purple to me. Added note about vector/coordinate information $\endgroup$ – gandalf3♦ Jul 13 '15 at 21:46
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    $\begingroup$ I found this by searching "node editor gray purple". $\endgroup$ – AndreKR Sep 22 '19 at 7:29

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