A focused beam of light cuts material by burning, melting, or vaporizing along a line. Fast, accurate, no tool wear, no contact. The default for sheet acrylic, plywood, thin steel, and the production technique that runs in nearly every school shop and makerspace.
Thermal cutting using a focused high-power coherent light source. CO2 lasers (10.6 µm) cut organic and ceramic materials well; fiber lasers (1.06 µm) couple efficiently into metals. Edge quality depends on assist gas (oxygen for steel oxidation cut, nitrogen for inert metal cut), focal point, and feed rate.
A working library of materials and processes. Saves to this browser only — no account, no cloud.
Nothing saved yet. Open a material, process, or application and tap + project.
House vocabulary — terms ForMatter uses with intent.
Materials and processes for people who design and make things.
A local-first library of materials, processes, and applications, equal weight, citable everywhere. 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, 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. Voice blocks: Barthes, Yanagi, Benjamin channeled within their philosophy; Lefteri verbatim. All cited.
Local to this browser. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.