Temper

Overview

Temper is made for a small, independent bladesmith forge that states its numbers rather than its adjectives — a stated steel program, a stated Rockwell hardness, a stated edge geometry, not marketing fog. The brief called for the catalogue’s liquid-glass material technique to be reused in a fresh industry with its own narrative logic, deliberately re-grounded away from glass and water: the coupling here is a forge’s ember heat, not a literal liquid or glass container.

A fixed, full-viewport WebGL2 canvas runs a real, continuously advected and periodically folded noise field — the same class of physics as a fluid simulation, standing in for a smith folding and drawing out a billet — rendered as swirling pattern-welded Damascus grain on a tapered blade silhouette, alongside a drifting low-alpha ember layer representing the forge fire. Its state is read twice each frame: once by a GPU fragment shader that paints the visible grain and ember glow, and once by a CPU-side pass that drives every .glass panel’\”s own inner-glow intensity and live ember-color tint from the same simulation state.

Two secondary techniques round out the signature set: a scroll-scrubbed SVG diagram tracing the bladesmithing process (billet, fold and draw, normalize and harden, temper, grind and finish), and an interactive oxide temper-color slider showing real bladesmithing color science — pale straw through gold, bronze, and blue — with the hardness and use-case that corresponds to each stage.

Two cross-linked custom post types carry the content: Blades (individual commissioned knives with steel type, Rockwell hardness, blade length, and edge geometry) and Steel Programs (pattern/composition programs with layer count and characteristic look), matched by a shared free-text field the way this catalogue’\”s installation/material and expression/cask pairs are.