Work / 03 · Tool
Forma
Pick a shape, set the light, export a transparent PNG.
- Role
- Design and build
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- Shipped, MIT
- Stack
- Runs in the browser, no server
- Numbers
- 18 shapes · 15 materials · 6 environments
- Links
- Source
- Shape, material and light in one canvas.
- Six environments. Midnight is selected.
- One search box filters every picker.
A 3D shape on a transparent background is a small ask, and it should not need an account.
Forma is a shape playground that runs in the browser. Pick a shape, give it a material, set the light, and export a transparent PNG. Nothing uploads and nothing needs a server, because the whole thing runs on your machine.
Under the editor is a typed engine that treats shape, material, environment and effect as four separate choices that compose. That is why the same composition can leave as a PNG or as a snippet you paste into a page.
What it is
One canvas, four choices:
- Shape, material, environment, effect. Eighteen shapes, fifteen materials and six environments, plus effects and presets to start from. Paste an SVG and it extrudes into a shape of its own.
- Two ways out. A transparent PNG, or a self-contained embed snippet with a small browser bundle to sit beside it.
- Quiet controls. Search filters every picker. H hides the panel. Reset puts the default sphere back. On a phone the panel starts collapsed so the shape gets the screen.
- Free, and yours. MIT licensed, no signup, no server. Self-host it or fork it.
What it actually took
The hard part is invisible. Every time you switch a shape or a material, the engine has to hand the old one back to the GPU. Miss one and the tab slowly eats memory. So the test suite cycles compositions at least fifty times across a stratified sample of 360 shape, material and environment combinations, and checks that nothing is left behind.
The render loop is the other quiet piece. One frame scheduler drives everything and pauses when the tab is hidden, so a tab you forgot about is not still rendering.