The safety glass of every shower door, every car side window, every modern glass railing, every glass storefront door. Tempered glass starts as ordinary float glass and gains its safety properties from a controlled heat-and-quench process that puts the surfaces under compression and the interior under tension — the residual stress profile makes the glass 4-5 times stronger than annealed float, and when it does break, it shatters into small relatively-blunt cubes (~5-10 mm across) rather than long pointed shards. The shower-door spec, the safety-glazing requirement at low elevations near doors, the structural-glass railing — all tempered. The trade-off is that tempered glass cannot be cut, drilled, or edge-worked after tempering — every dimension and every hole must be done before the temper. The glass-shop workflow: cut to final size, edge-grind, drill holes, then temper. Buy through any glass shop or architectural glazing house.
Soda-lime float glass (typically 4-19 mm thick) heat-treated by uniformly heating to ~620 °C (just below the softening point) then rapidly cooling the surfaces with high-velocity air jets. The surfaces solidify first while the interior is still hot; as the interior cools, it contracts and pulls the surfaces into permanent compression (~100 MPa) with corresponding interior tension (~50 MPa). The compressive surface layer must absorb any tensile load from bending or impact before glass-failure can occur, raising the effective strength to 4-5x annealed (modulus of rupture 120-200 MPa vs. 35-50 MPa untempered). The fracture pattern is the engineered safety property — when failure does occur, the stored elastic energy releases simultaneously across the entire pane, producing the characteristic small-cube fragmentation per ANSI Z97.1 / CPSC 16 CFR 1201 (US safety glazing standards) and EN 12150 (European). Cannot be field-cut, drilled, or chamfered after tempering — the residual stress is balanced and any edge intrusion releases it, shattering the panel. Heat-strengthened glass is a parallel grade with lower compressive surface stress (40-70 MPa) and a different fracture mode (larger pieces, not safety-rated) — used in spandrel and structural overhead applications where heat-induced bending loads matter more than fragmentation safety.
Principled BSDF defaults derived from the sphere transparent finish. Reasonable seed for Blender, Substance, Keyshot, Rhino — tune per material. Or grab the whole library at once: ForMaterials library →
# finish: transparent albedo #d8e8e8 metallic 0.00 roughness 0.05 ior 1.50 transmission 1.00 clearcoat 0.00 sheen 0.00 anisotropic 0.00 thickness 1.00 attenuation_distance 0.60
{
"albedo": "#d8e8e8",
"metallic": 0.0,
"roughness": 0.05,
"ior": 1.5,
"transmission": 1.0,
"clearcoat": 0.0,
"sheen": 0.0,
"anisotropic": 0.0,
"thickness": 1.0,
"attenuation_distance": 0.6
}
# Blender 4.x — Principled BSDF
# Tempered Glass (Fully Tempered Safety Glass) · finish: transparent
import bpy
mat = bpy.data.materials.new(name="mat_glass_tempered")
mat.use_nodes = True
bsdf = mat.node_tree.nodes["Principled BSDF"]
bsdf.inputs["Base Color"].default_value = (0.6867, 0.807, 0.807, 1.0)
bsdf.inputs["Metallic"].default_value = 0.000
bsdf.inputs["Roughness"].default_value = 0.050
bsdf.inputs["IOR"].default_value = 1.500
bsdf.inputs["Transmission Weight"].default_value = 1.000
bsdf.inputs["Coat Weight"].default_value = 0.000
bsdf.inputs["Sheen Weight"].default_value = 0.000
bsdf.inputs["Anisotropic"].default_value = 0.000
# KeyShot 11+ — lux Python API, Generic material
# Tempered Glass (Fully Tempered Safety Glass) · finish: transparent
# Run from Window → Scripting Console
import lux
mat = lux.createMaterial(name="mat_glass_tempered", materialType="Generic")
mat.setProperty("diffuse", (216, 232, 232)) # 8-bit sRGB
mat.setProperty("metallic", 0.000)
mat.setProperty("roughness", 0.050)
mat.setProperty("indexOfRefraction", 1.500)
mat.setProperty("transparency", 1.000)
mat.setProperty("coatingWeight", 0.000)
{
"_format": "Substance Designer / Painter \u2014 pbrMetalRough constants",
"_about": "Tempered Glass (Fully Tempered Safety Glass) \u00b7 finish: transparent",
"baseColor": {
"r": 0.6867,
"g": 0.807,
"b": 0.807
},
"metallic": 0.0,
"roughness": 0.05,
"ior": 1.5,
"opacity": 0.0,
"anisotropyLevel": 0.0,
"_notes": "Channels listed are the standard Substance pbrMetalRough output. Drop into a Uniform Color node per channel, or as the constant input on a layered stack."
}{
"asset": {
"version": "2.0",
"generator": "ForMatter"
},
"materials": [
{
"name": "mat_glass_tempered",
"pbrMetallicRoughness": {
"baseColorFactor": [
0.6867,
0.807,
0.807,
1.0
],
"metallicFactor": 0.0,
"roughnessFactor": 0.05
},
"extensions": {
"KHR_materials_transmission": {
"transmissionFactor": 1.0
}
}
}
]
}# USD Preview Surface — UsdShade.MaterialLook prim attributes
# Tempered Glass (Fully Tempered Safety Glass) · finish: transparent
def Material "mat_glass_tempered" {
token outputs:surface.connect = </mat_glass_tempered/PreviewSurface.outputs:surface>
def Shader "PreviewSurface" {
uniform token info:id = "UsdPreviewSurface"
color3f inputs:diffuseColor = (0.6867, 0.807, 0.807)
float inputs:metallic = 0.000
float inputs:roughness = 0.050
float inputs:ior = 1.500
float inputs:opacity = 0.000
float inputs:clearcoat = 0.000
token outputs:surface
}
}
ASTM C1048 tempered glass specifications; ANSI Z97.1 / CPSC 16 CFR 1201 safety glazing; EN 12150 European tempered glass standard.
House vocabulary — terms ForMatter uses with intent.
Materials and processes for people who design and make things.
A local-first library of materials, processes, applications, and finishes — equal weight, citable everywhere, with cost-over-volume curves, trade-off profiles, equipment-tier filters, and second-life paths layered onto the data so a student can move from "what is this" toward "what's actually buildable here, now, by me." Part of the renato.design ecosystem — sibling of Plenum, Specimen, Ingenue, gesture, graf, and the Renato Rhino plug-ins. Form and matter, inseparable.
Half of teaching materials is teaching how the material is made into the thing. The standard subscription library was always light on that half. The wedge here isn't better samples or a prettier interface — it's treating Process as a peer entity, not a footnote.
Conway's Material World on raw materials, Lefteri's Making It on processes, Forty's Concrete and Culture, Sparke's Design in Context, Bürdek's Design: History, Theory and Practice of Product Design, Schröpfer's Material Design on materials in architecture, Winchester's The Perfectionists on tolerance, Minshall's Your Life Is Manufactured on the global supply chain, von Busch's Making Trouble on material activism, Were's How Materials Matter, Hegger / Drexler / Zeumer's Basics Materials, Untracht and McCreight on metalsmithing, USDA Forest Products Lab on woods, GIA on gemstones, Schott / CoorsTek / Toray / Owens Corning datasheets, MakeItFrom for verifiable property numbers, ASM Handbook, ISO standards. Museum holdings draw from the Met, MAD, V&A, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Newark Museum of Art, British Museum, Heard Museum, Smithsonian NMAI, Eiteljorg Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, and Grand Rapids Art Museum — collection-record permalinks only, designer overview pages and exhibition listings excluded. Voice blocks now ride on every entry kind — material, process, application, and finish — and include Ruskin on iron, Anni Albers on twining, Greg Lynn on the shred-and-teeth NURBS lineage, Pugin on the metal that won't be hammered, Barthes / Yanagi / Benjamin channeled within their philosophy; Sparke, Bürdek, Forty, Conway, Schröpfer, Minshall, von Busch, Lefteri, Pat Pruitt, Mary Lee Hu, Tom Joyce, Albert Paley, and the rest of the contemporary makers quoted verbatim with citation. All cited.
Local to this browser. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.