This year we are considering purchasing CAD. I have been given a
sample of Jewel CAD. The price for this is reasonble to all others.
We are probably going to have the pieces milled by an outside source.
The price for milling machines in not in the budget, I would like to
be competent designing CAD first. I just want to be able to design
on CAD and then show customers the virtual piece in our showroom.
Hand drawings and edit times are limiting to production for so many
reasons
I would love feedback about other choices, prices,ease of use and so
on.
Before committing take a look at Jewelsmith by Delcam. It’s more
expensive but a great product. Another avenue that is cheaper would
be Rhino with Techgems and Flamingo (for rendering).
I couldn’t figure out how to make truly unique items with jewelcad,
but I didn’t use it very much.
Hi Brent, If you are afraid of CAD then stay away from all of them -
On the other hand if you have any venturesome interest or feel like a
challenge is worth the efforts you put in it, then jump-in and meet
your completion head on.
To many jeweler’s present CAD to customers with disintegrated ideas
and loss of what the customer had expected because the one ( you
perhaps ) lost or passed your ideas to other producers that
reinterpret "your Ideas in to what they think your customer wants,
and
she will not be happy.
Your work is what she came to for, so, give her the real you. Don"t
let a learning curve hold you back from being unique and special to
all that ask you to do something for them.
At least you can create, adjust and produce, finish-out and collect
the whole thing and your smile will be a small part of being a well
accomplished JEWELLER!
That’s my story, And I’m stick-en to-it.
Stephen Wyrick, CMBJ,GIA’s, and others of personel interest.
I highly recommend that you explore Gemvision’s Matrix before you
make a commitment to a CAD software. Their new 6.0 edition has quite
a few templates that can reduce the learning curve dramatically.
Customer support is excellent and their ongoing software innovation
is the reason our company has shifted to Matrix for all of our CAD
operators.
I believe they also have software that is geared toward retailers
that want to sit with their customer and use it as a sales tool.
As far as designing pieces that can be manufactured, MJSA Journal
will likely have an article in May that focuses on common CAD
errors.
If you need help with model creation, we grow Envision Tec and
Solidscape mountings for about half what many service providers
charge if you choose to cast it in gold or platinum with us.
While there are quite a few programs out there Rhino is becoming a
standard, it is fairly inexpensive and with the addition of TechGems
you can have a tool set that will allow you to do virtually any
jewelry CAD job. If you step up in price to Matrix it is a excellent
jewelry specific tool to add over the top of Rhino that will speed
up many of the jewelry design tasks.
I use Rhino and recommend it as a beginning tool. Not because it is
easy but it will allow you to do most anything you wish to in the
way of 3D modeling. Once you are familiar with Rhino get Matrix which
is a set of macro routines built on top of Rhino. It is very cool and
fast way to create jewelry specific models but for those times where
you need to do something that is not covered by the macro routines
you need to be able to work in Rhino which is why I suggest it as the
starting point.
Rhino is a PC specific program but for Mac users like myself the new
Mac hardware will run Windows XP and Vista as fast as any PC of
similar specs. Apples Boot Camp software. Rhino runs just fine on
the Apple Intel hardware.
BTW
There is exciting news from Rhino for the Mac users they have a
version of Rhino 4 that is being developed for OSX. I have a beta
version of it and it is not fully developed yet but is coming along
nicely and will be a great tool once it is completed, so keep your
eyes open for more info on the Rhino OSX version.
Jim
James Binnion @James_Binnion
James Binnion Metal Arts