Meet your Materials Library
We invented Proofgrade™ materials to make printing easy, reliable, and safe. But sometimes you want to work with other materials. Cutting boards. Leaves. Guacamole.
Working with non-Proofgrade materials is more difficult and more dangerous than printing on Proofgrade materials. You have to determine if the material is safe for lasering. You need to experiment to find the right settings. Some materials can catch on fire easily. But we know our customers want the power to experiment, which is why we created Manual Mode, Manual Focus, and many other features to help you stretch the boundaries of your lasering experience.
Now, we’re introducing one of the most-requested features to help you use your own materials: the ability to save your settings.
With that, the Glowforge Materials Library is now simply your Materials Library. As you know, we’ve already preloaded settings for Glowforge materials as well as things like Macbooks in the Materials Library. And now we’ve added the ability for you to save manual settings for materials you’ve sourced yourself, so you can save the results of your experiments in something other than a notepad.
Let’s say you’re trying to engrave your family recipes on some new cutting boards or personalize a batch of sandstone coasters with your team logo. You can use manual mode to fine-tune your print settings. Now, you can save those settings so they’ll be ready to go in any of your future design projects, getting you to a finished print faster.
Manual mode settings can be saved for any material. Note that for now, each saved setting is tied to an operation. You can create your own custom list of settings for Cut, Score, Vector Engrave, and Bitmap Engrave and the list will be available for any material type. For each step, you’ll see the list for the selected operation under “Custom”:
To use custom settings, start by checking out this tutorial.
Please note: Printing on a huge variety of materials is exciting, but extreme caution is required. Beware that printing with custom settings creates a high risk of fire or damage to your Glowforge. Follow all instructions in the Glowforge user manual carefully and never print with your laser unattended.
Glowforge iOS app improvements
The Glowforge iOS app is a spectacular way to design your next project! If you haven’t already, install it from the App Store here.
We’re making it easier for your fingers to navigate the iOS app with a brand new workspace editing experience optimized especially for touch screens. Open up a design to check it out! You can now reorder steps in your design as well as tap on each step to see the corresponding artwork highlighted in the workspace. We’ve also made it easier to select, resize, and rotate artwork.