What do these icons mean?

[Anonymous]

Hi, I'm watching a Youtube video on how to set up pole vectors and the person recording had this icon set up before the video started. What is it, and how do I set it up?

[kellykw · Accepted solution]

Those are transform nodes, I suspect that tutorial you're watching has shapes turned on 🙂 you can access this under display -> shapes within the outliner and it will toggle on the visibility of your shape nodes. 

Geo, curves etc are comprised of a transform node which stores transformations such as translation, rotation etc, a shape node that stores the vertex or control point positions and a creation node that stores the construction history. 

The shape node is the child of the transform node which is why as soon as you turn on shapes in the outliner you see it stepped under the transform node like that.