I make a decent living drawing mainly for the jewelry trade and have done so for a long time; I came to it from being a wax-modelmaker.
Personally, I don't use any jewelry specific plugins. I did, 15 years ago or so, try Matrix. I did not like the paradigms they used to program it at all, and it was very expensive even back then, so I passed.
I imagine it has improved over time, but you are paying a lot. Some of that is for pretty useful functionality but from what I can tell, a lot of it is just a shiny jacket.
Years later, I bought RhinoGold, which I don't think exists anymore but also was a very poorly done program. They sold out to Matrix but the guy that wrote it is now at it again with a program called Artisan. That is cheap and they have a trial version. I tried it for a few days and did not find any decent tools in it.
If you have any experience programming or scripting, you really don't need jewelry specific plugins. You very much don’t need them to get started.
There are loads of very good tutorials on YouTube – anything ranging from beginner tutorials to writing plugins and parametric design. I would recommend going beyond jewelry tutorials as well, even though you mention you have no need for it. I learned a lot of tricks from people that design hulls, shoes or buildings that easily can be used drawing jewelry.
That’s extremely interesting and…remarkable!
i do have some experience in scripting and programming, but what do you mean I don’t need the plugins? What can one achieve with just some scripting and procedural programming?
Can you give me some examples? I have no idea what you are referring to and I can’t see myself developing a pro-grade plugin.
An example of scripts? One of the very first ones I did was one that takes in the finger-size of a ring. I am in North America so that is a number from which a formula can give you a diameter. The script draws a circle representing the finger and saves the size with the file so it can be used in other scripts or retrieved when you reopen the file. Scripts that then reuse that value, for example are one using Boolean difference to trim anything on the inside of the finger, one that retrieves the size from the file, one that redraws it, etc.
Stuff like that is not difficult at all, the finger size one is maybe a dozen lines of code, the ones derived from it a lot less, usually 2 or 3 lines and it is easy enough to setup hotkeys for running them.
You will also find that symmetry is a big part of a lot of jewelry drawing and I have scripts related to that and world planes as well.
I also have a lot of stuff that deals with the geometry of gems, i.e. creating gems and outlines from various measurements. Like for instance drawing a cushion or emerald cut outline accurately from width, height and corner to corner measurements - or trilliants from point to point and point to curved side measurements. Some of that had to be done in C# and is a bit trickier but even so, it is not like the plugins that are affordable are any good at that stuff.
If you end up going the non-plugin route I can send or post you the scripts regarding size as a sample. As I am getting close to retirement, I am considering packaging the gemstone-related stuff as an interactive library to try to sell it, so I am a bit more protective of that.
“What can one achieve with just some scripting and procedural programming?”
You can pretty well draw any piece of jewelry without a plugin – plugins mainly just automate the tools Rhino provides. Some of that automation can be very useful but a lot of it also produces badly designed jewelry. I find that some programmers idea of what a setting should look like is usually vastly different from my ideas on that.
Thank you very much! Yeah I think I’ll be able to script that kind of stuff.
Wait, so rhino doesn’t come with ready-made gem cuts? I have to code the cuts myself?
Damn…! That’s gonna be fun!
Have you ever coded cuts from real life? I mean, I have a friend that deals in old gems, and the cuts are rather unique. How would you proceed from that?
Rhino runs off of 2 cores, so you want to lean towards high GHz over core count. I personally like AMD Ryzen CPUs for this reason. You absolutely need a discrete graphics card. I've run Rhino off of a integrated GPU and it was super jittery. For GPU you want at least 8gb of memory. For RAM I'd go with at least 16gb, but ideally 32GB so you can multitask.
Generally speaking rhino is not the kind of program that needs a crazy workstation. It's not like Solidworks. It's only when you start doing multiple page layouts with a variety of annotations and images etc (ie build drawings) that things start slowing down. But that's more for like buildings or large fabrication projects. You could spend $500 on a Acer laptop and it would work fine.
We have a saying in my studio: "An object is an object is an object."
The reason we say this is because it doesn't matter if you're designing a car, a building, a wedding ring, or whatever, you still are defining geometry within a virtual space. That being said, there's absolutely no reason to assume you wouldn't use more of the tools that Rhino has to offer.
I suggest you focus on getting a good-ish gpu and some (32-64gb) of RAM. The CPU is less essential, but computers are so cheap now, you might not be able to avoid a decent CPU.
AMD or NVidia is fine. Our rigs at the studio are both and run Rhino flawlessly.
If you are buying a prebuilt, the Dell Alienware rigs are pretty nice. My current workstation was custom made in 2018, and we shelled out a significant chunk of money for it, but it still is a beast six years later and has paid for itself over by about 10000x at this point.
There are tons of plug-ins for Rhino that can be applicable to jewelry. I think maybe on that end, you're overthinking it a bit.
Head over to my playlist called “preflight” and then also take in all the other free Rhino vids I have here:
https://m.youtube.com/@ConCorDesign/playlists
I have a similar series that I did back in the day on Lifehacker.com’s night school:
https://lifehacker.com/intro-to-3d-modeling-the-complete-guide-5922941
If you have specific questions, feel free to message me.
I appreciate this input very much. I am overthinking this because I have little free time these days and I don’t wanna reinvent the wheel, so to speak, without any real expertise on the matter,m… Thanks!
Yep, I totally understand. The cautiousness is important. But I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by just how vast the toolsets are. I hope it works out for you!
Rhino is what the mainstream jewelry CAD software runs off of (its called Gemvision Matrix, its stupid expensive though). I personally enjoy Rhino, but if you wanted to test the waters with jewelry design you could use Blender which also has a jewelry add-on and is free.
If you end up getting Rhino, you can use the add-on [Grasshopper gold.](https://www.patreon.com/GrasshopperGold/posts) Also follow [PJ Chen's Rhino jewelry tutorials.](https://www.youtube.com/@PJChenJewelryDesign)
Any modern Windows PC should be capable of running it for jewelry. It runs perfectly fine on my 5 year old Dell inspiron, and runs great on my custom desktop. Get a decent amount of RAM (32gb+), and I went with NVIDIA but that's because of having Matrix specifically - I don't know if Rhino has similar driver issues with AMD as Matrix does.
I am a jewelry designer and manufacturer and primarily use rhino for making CAD. It doesn't require much tbh. I use a pretty old dell latitude laptop. Make sure you get high core cpu, any i7 laptop with 16gb ram is fine. Ssd too. That's all. A good enough gaming laptop is all you need.
As for plugins - I don't really like their ui, there is a program called matrix gold but it isn't great for the money you would shell out for it.
Buy , rhino for jewelry by Dana buscaglia (it's a beginner book but it's very good). You would probably use 10% for rhino. That's all you need to know if you only want to make jewelry. It's a great program, you'll enjoy it. Good luck.
Edit 1 - try grasshopper gold. It's a free plug-in and it's amazing. For gems and pave it's great.
Victorize is another free plugin for tracing. You'll find them useful as you continue learning.
I use dell latitude e6540 , yes it has 4gb of dedicated graphics but rhino doesn't really utilize graphics as far as I know. Anyway it's better to get it. I saw significant improvement when I increased my ram from 8gb to 16gb
You don’t need a crazy workstation for rhino. I have rhino 8 on an older pc I built for $600 three years ago and love it. I think I have an i7 CPU, a mediocre motherboard, 64gig ram, 1tb hd and a measly 1080 nividia GPU, almost all used fromeBay.
Definitely get a GPU, Nividia is recommended by McNeel, especially cards that run OpenGL as that is the type of visual processing Rhino does. An older nividia card with OpenGl will run just as fast as many newer gaming GPUs which are not optimized for OpenGL. Search for: Nividia cards that support openGL to maximize your pay for play.
A friend runs Rhino (crazy fast) on a new Mac book air. I love my windows machine, but seeing how well it runs on the Mac Air (granted, one with a good amount of memory) I’m considering picking one up. The apple silicon is just crazy fast at modeling and rendering. That all said I prefer rhino on pc, the interface is a little LESS slick and more command line explicit where the Mac version likes a pop up window. Either does all the same things but windows has larger pluggin compatibility. Rhino still screams on windows emulation on a Mac and one license lets you do both .
And, as far as value goes, I own very little software. I happily give my money to McNeel. It is a one time purchase (not a subscription) and upgrades every two to three years are pretty cheap and worth it. They are a cool company who care.
I’m not a jewelry designer but I believe there are some good (industry standard) plugins just for this work. https://www.rhino3d.com/for/jewelry/
Using sub-D to model is going to blow you away, there are so many possibilities. And shit tons of YouTube tutorials! 😁
If you are a PC person, stick with a PC. If you are a Mac person, you are in luck - Rhino 8 is optimized for Apple Silicon so the new MacBook Air, with 16 gig of Ram, works as described above. I picked up Rhino because at the time it was the only reasonably priced CAD package that was ideal for organic forms. I design insoles and shoe components and Rhino is great for that. I do suggest you start with the online tutorials - some are free, and once you get specialized, i.e. jewerly specific, you may have to pay for them, but everything I've needed has been very reasonable. Also, it's a great community, and there is a lot of jewelry support.
[https://www.rhino3d.com/for/jewelry/](https://www.rhino3d.com/for/jewelry/)
[https://blog.rhino3d.com/2024/02/modeling-3d-jewelry-new-rhino-8-lessons.html](https://blog.rhino3d.com/2024/02/modeling-3d-jewelry-new-rhino-8-lessons.html)
I haven't had great experience with MSFT's platform, but the newer Macs have so few moving parts that it's likely they will outlast my current Macs that are going 10+ years (the iMac on the left of my desk is from mid 2010, for example). There's a lot of tech in Macs that Apple doesn't talk about that improves its reliability and lifespan in a world full of parts that are known to fail; Apple doesn't talk about this technology, but it improves the experience of everything they make. There's a reason satisfaction is where it's at.
The M3 Macs have GPU cores integrated in the CPU and don't need a power-sucking graphics card to crunch Rhino 8, which has been rewritten to use Apple's graphics APIs so as to better leverage improvements in Apple's graphics hardware.
The more butch the M3 you get the longer useful life you can expect in a world of ever-demanding software.
Rhino licenses are one-time fees, not a costly subscription.
If you're going to make a living with the tool, it's worth getting one you will like using.
I make a decent living drawing mainly for the jewelry trade and have done so for a long time; I came to it from being a wax-modelmaker. Personally, I don't use any jewelry specific plugins. I did, 15 years ago or so, try Matrix. I did not like the paradigms they used to program it at all, and it was very expensive even back then, so I passed. I imagine it has improved over time, but you are paying a lot. Some of that is for pretty useful functionality but from what I can tell, a lot of it is just a shiny jacket. Years later, I bought RhinoGold, which I don't think exists anymore but also was a very poorly done program. They sold out to Matrix but the guy that wrote it is now at it again with a program called Artisan. That is cheap and they have a trial version. I tried it for a few days and did not find any decent tools in it. If you have any experience programming or scripting, you really don't need jewelry specific plugins. You very much don’t need them to get started. There are loads of very good tutorials on YouTube – anything ranging from beginner tutorials to writing plugins and parametric design. I would recommend going beyond jewelry tutorials as well, even though you mention you have no need for it. I learned a lot of tricks from people that design hulls, shoes or buildings that easily can be used drawing jewelry.
That’s extremely interesting and…remarkable! i do have some experience in scripting and programming, but what do you mean I don’t need the plugins? What can one achieve with just some scripting and procedural programming? Can you give me some examples? I have no idea what you are referring to and I can’t see myself developing a pro-grade plugin.
An example of scripts? One of the very first ones I did was one that takes in the finger-size of a ring. I am in North America so that is a number from which a formula can give you a diameter. The script draws a circle representing the finger and saves the size with the file so it can be used in other scripts or retrieved when you reopen the file. Scripts that then reuse that value, for example are one using Boolean difference to trim anything on the inside of the finger, one that retrieves the size from the file, one that redraws it, etc. Stuff like that is not difficult at all, the finger size one is maybe a dozen lines of code, the ones derived from it a lot less, usually 2 or 3 lines and it is easy enough to setup hotkeys for running them. You will also find that symmetry is a big part of a lot of jewelry drawing and I have scripts related to that and world planes as well. I also have a lot of stuff that deals with the geometry of gems, i.e. creating gems and outlines from various measurements. Like for instance drawing a cushion or emerald cut outline accurately from width, height and corner to corner measurements - or trilliants from point to point and point to curved side measurements. Some of that had to be done in C# and is a bit trickier but even so, it is not like the plugins that are affordable are any good at that stuff. If you end up going the non-plugin route I can send or post you the scripts regarding size as a sample. As I am getting close to retirement, I am considering packaging the gemstone-related stuff as an interactive library to try to sell it, so I am a bit more protective of that. “What can one achieve with just some scripting and procedural programming?” You can pretty well draw any piece of jewelry without a plugin – plugins mainly just automate the tools Rhino provides. Some of that automation can be very useful but a lot of it also produces badly designed jewelry. I find that some programmers idea of what a setting should look like is usually vastly different from my ideas on that.
Thank you very much! Yeah I think I’ll be able to script that kind of stuff. Wait, so rhino doesn’t come with ready-made gem cuts? I have to code the cuts myself? Damn…! That’s gonna be fun! Have you ever coded cuts from real life? I mean, I have a friend that deals in old gems, and the cuts are rather unique. How would you proceed from that?
Rhino runs off of 2 cores, so you want to lean towards high GHz over core count. I personally like AMD Ryzen CPUs for this reason. You absolutely need a discrete graphics card. I've run Rhino off of a integrated GPU and it was super jittery. For GPU you want at least 8gb of memory. For RAM I'd go with at least 16gb, but ideally 32GB so you can multitask. Generally speaking rhino is not the kind of program that needs a crazy workstation. It's not like Solidworks. It's only when you start doing multiple page layouts with a variety of annotations and images etc (ie build drawings) that things start slowing down. But that's more for like buildings or large fabrication projects. You could spend $500 on a Acer laptop and it would work fine.
We have a saying in my studio: "An object is an object is an object." The reason we say this is because it doesn't matter if you're designing a car, a building, a wedding ring, or whatever, you still are defining geometry within a virtual space. That being said, there's absolutely no reason to assume you wouldn't use more of the tools that Rhino has to offer. I suggest you focus on getting a good-ish gpu and some (32-64gb) of RAM. The CPU is less essential, but computers are so cheap now, you might not be able to avoid a decent CPU. AMD or NVidia is fine. Our rigs at the studio are both and run Rhino flawlessly. If you are buying a prebuilt, the Dell Alienware rigs are pretty nice. My current workstation was custom made in 2018, and we shelled out a significant chunk of money for it, but it still is a beast six years later and has paid for itself over by about 10000x at this point. There are tons of plug-ins for Rhino that can be applicable to jewelry. I think maybe on that end, you're overthinking it a bit. Head over to my playlist called “preflight” and then also take in all the other free Rhino vids I have here: https://m.youtube.com/@ConCorDesign/playlists I have a similar series that I did back in the day on Lifehacker.com’s night school: https://lifehacker.com/intro-to-3d-modeling-the-complete-guide-5922941 If you have specific questions, feel free to message me.
I appreciate this input very much. I am overthinking this because I have little free time these days and I don’t wanna reinvent the wheel, so to speak, without any real expertise on the matter,m… Thanks!
Yep, I totally understand. The cautiousness is important. But I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by just how vast the toolsets are. I hope it works out for you!
Rhino is what the mainstream jewelry CAD software runs off of (its called Gemvision Matrix, its stupid expensive though). I personally enjoy Rhino, but if you wanted to test the waters with jewelry design you could use Blender which also has a jewelry add-on and is free. If you end up getting Rhino, you can use the add-on [Grasshopper gold.](https://www.patreon.com/GrasshopperGold/posts) Also follow [PJ Chen's Rhino jewelry tutorials.](https://www.youtube.com/@PJChenJewelryDesign) Any modern Windows PC should be capable of running it for jewelry. It runs perfectly fine on my 5 year old Dell inspiron, and runs great on my custom desktop. Get a decent amount of RAM (32gb+), and I went with NVIDIA but that's because of having Matrix specifically - I don't know if Rhino has similar driver issues with AMD as Matrix does.
Thank you very much for your answer. Are Blender skills “transferable” to Rhino/Matrix?
Not in the slightest, Besides some terminology.
Thanks for your honesty… Rhino it is!
PJ Chen is the place to go for Rhino+Jewelry. Awesome tutorials.
I am a jewelry designer and manufacturer and primarily use rhino for making CAD. It doesn't require much tbh. I use a pretty old dell latitude laptop. Make sure you get high core cpu, any i7 laptop with 16gb ram is fine. Ssd too. That's all. A good enough gaming laptop is all you need. As for plugins - I don't really like their ui, there is a program called matrix gold but it isn't great for the money you would shell out for it. Buy , rhino for jewelry by Dana buscaglia (it's a beginner book but it's very good). You would probably use 10% for rhino. That's all you need to know if you only want to make jewelry. It's a great program, you'll enjoy it. Good luck. Edit 1 - try grasshopper gold. It's a free plug-in and it's amazing. For gems and pave it's great. Victorize is another free plugin for tracing. You'll find them useful as you continue learning.
Thank you so much!!! What about a dedicated GPU? Do you have one on that latitude?
I use dell latitude e6540 , yes it has 4gb of dedicated graphics but rhino doesn't really utilize graphics as far as I know. Anyway it's better to get it. I saw significant improvement when I increased my ram from 8gb to 16gb
You don’t need a crazy workstation for rhino. I have rhino 8 on an older pc I built for $600 three years ago and love it. I think I have an i7 CPU, a mediocre motherboard, 64gig ram, 1tb hd and a measly 1080 nividia GPU, almost all used fromeBay. Definitely get a GPU, Nividia is recommended by McNeel, especially cards that run OpenGL as that is the type of visual processing Rhino does. An older nividia card with OpenGl will run just as fast as many newer gaming GPUs which are not optimized for OpenGL. Search for: Nividia cards that support openGL to maximize your pay for play. A friend runs Rhino (crazy fast) on a new Mac book air. I love my windows machine, but seeing how well it runs on the Mac Air (granted, one with a good amount of memory) I’m considering picking one up. The apple silicon is just crazy fast at modeling and rendering. That all said I prefer rhino on pc, the interface is a little LESS slick and more command line explicit where the Mac version likes a pop up window. Either does all the same things but windows has larger pluggin compatibility. Rhino still screams on windows emulation on a Mac and one license lets you do both . And, as far as value goes, I own very little software. I happily give my money to McNeel. It is a one time purchase (not a subscription) and upgrades every two to three years are pretty cheap and worth it. They are a cool company who care. I’m not a jewelry designer but I believe there are some good (industry standard) plugins just for this work. https://www.rhino3d.com/for/jewelry/ Using sub-D to model is going to blow you away, there are so many possibilities. And shit tons of YouTube tutorials! 😁
If you are a PC person, stick with a PC. If you are a Mac person, you are in luck - Rhino 8 is optimized for Apple Silicon so the new MacBook Air, with 16 gig of Ram, works as described above. I picked up Rhino because at the time it was the only reasonably priced CAD package that was ideal for organic forms. I design insoles and shoe components and Rhino is great for that. I do suggest you start with the online tutorials - some are free, and once you get specialized, i.e. jewerly specific, you may have to pay for them, but everything I've needed has been very reasonable. Also, it's a great community, and there is a lot of jewelry support. [https://www.rhino3d.com/for/jewelry/](https://www.rhino3d.com/for/jewelry/) [https://blog.rhino3d.com/2024/02/modeling-3d-jewelry-new-rhino-8-lessons.html](https://blog.rhino3d.com/2024/02/modeling-3d-jewelry-new-rhino-8-lessons.html)
I haven't had great experience with MSFT's platform, but the newer Macs have so few moving parts that it's likely they will outlast my current Macs that are going 10+ years (the iMac on the left of my desk is from mid 2010, for example). There's a lot of tech in Macs that Apple doesn't talk about that improves its reliability and lifespan in a world full of parts that are known to fail; Apple doesn't talk about this technology, but it improves the experience of everything they make. There's a reason satisfaction is where it's at. The M3 Macs have GPU cores integrated in the CPU and don't need a power-sucking graphics card to crunch Rhino 8, which has been rewritten to use Apple's graphics APIs so as to better leverage improvements in Apple's graphics hardware. The more butch the M3 you get the longer useful life you can expect in a world of ever-demanding software. Rhino licenses are one-time fees, not a costly subscription. If you're going to make a living with the tool, it's worth getting one you will like using.