My understanding is if you have the material in the bed, the Glowforge will see the invisible barcodes and set the correct settings for the material.
My question is, what happens when you put two different materials in there (lets say a hardwood and acrylic)? Do the settings change depending on where you align the artwork to be engraved/cut? Or is it a semi-auto feature; for example you have to click on the material on the screen to import those setting?
Excellent question! That scenario was exactly what Dan did in the Tested.com video with Will Smith. A piece of wood and a piece of acrylic (or whatever plastic it was) cut at the same time for a tea candle holder.
And the out come was?
That video was pre auto-detect/pre proofgrade, I think.
Here is the video queued up.
That’s true, but if at that time you were able to set up 2 different speed/power settings manually for two different materials, it would only stand to reason that you could do the same with Auto-detect Proofgrade materials as that is strictly the automation of loading speed/power settings. Unless of course there was a “slight of hand” in the video and the same speed/power settings were used for both cuts, letting the viewer take away from the video what they will. 
Even though I have not seen the GF live at a Maker Faire, the short glimpses of the interface would seem to indicate you can setup any cut/engrave image any way you would like. That’s what it looks like from those short glimpses anyway. Seemed to be using that colour paradigm for cutting/engraving. Probably way wrong on all this. . .
Does beg the question on proof grade how the QR codes translates to various cuts/engraves. How could they know ahead of time anything but a cut action (other than vector cut all the way through) of for example a vector etch to partial depth of cut or any form of 3D raster engraving? Trying to visualize that one.
Another question would be The code will be in all the sheet or only in one part? if you use the proofgrade material more than once, maybe you used the part with the code (if it is only in one place) o it will be detected anyway because it is in all the paper
I think I remember earlier discussions saying that the proofgrade barcodes were repeated all over each piece. They don’t have to be very big, since the SKU (or whatever) is all you need to retrieve the profile from the cloud.
That’s true. I guess my question is more how automated is it when there are multiple materials. Is it as simple as moving the design over the part and it knows the material? Is there a button you press to tell it to set the setting for that material? This is probably a moot question anyways, because I will probably be able to set the material type relatively quickly manually.
From what I saw, each color is a different step and you can change each step to what ever you want it to do (cut/engrave/score).
I’m assuming that for proofgrade, they will have saved setting for cutting and engraving separate, so it will change the setting depending on what you are doing.
Something that was shared somewhere was that for engraving hardwoods, they even have it nailed down to the shade of engrave that you want.
here:
At the moment, we just recognize one Proofgrade material at a time. Recognizing multiple materials and doing settings for each one is in the hopper. (Doing it properly requires some really clever image processing to figure out where one material ends and the next one starts).
We have a default engrave action (for filled areas) and cut setting (for strokes). Then you can change to e.g. a lighter or darker engrave, or a score instead of a cut.
At the moment we just have it in one place on a sticker, but we plan to have it cover the surface.