Jewelcad Tutorials Downloads

Jewelry Discussion
1

First, a few comments directed at no one in particular. I’ve been
looking into both jewelcad and jewelsmith for a while now. I have
Maya, but I didn’t want to have to built basic rings and settings
from scratch all the time, thinking it would be nice to have a program
that knows what size 6 is, what a 10 point diamond is - not just
graphics, but scaling and a built in base that’s jewelry geared. Boy,
what a dissapointment that is. Jewelcad isn’t too bad for 1/2 of a
program. Jewelsmith is just plain strange. Both of them cost a lot of
money, and for that you don’t even get a help file. I think I’ll just
translate the models to DXF, and use Maya and ZBrush (now THAT’S a
program!!) Anyway, since a search through Orchid for Jewelcad brought
up many messages that said, “HELP ME!”, I thought I would post some
tutorials that I have. They are in my Yahoo briefcase, free for all.
The address is:

http://briefcase.yahoo.com/@John_Donivan

They are archived as.rar, which, if you don’t have winrar you can
google it and get it - it’s like winzip, only better. Tutorials1
contains the player so make sure you get that - it’s a proprietary
player. #'s 2 and 3 are just more tutorials. Read the readme files for
how to get them to play. Have fun with them…

I guess the bottom line of my dissapointment is that the computer
industry is mature, at this point. Vector graphics programming is not
rocket science. Most of the algorithms have been in place since
autocad 1. Even the 3d aspects are well known. A program like Maya
can take a box and make it dance around the (virtual) room
-Literally!- inside of 10 minutes. Oh, well…

2

Hi John,

I don’t have any experience with Maya, but from what I understand,
it’s a very powerful program for what it does, but also very complex
to learn. I use Rhino and ArtCAM, two very different softwares, but
the combination meets my needs in terms of CAD jewelry design. ArtCAM
JewelSmith’s modeling strategies are unconventional, but once you
become familiar with the tools and discover what you can do with
them, it’s a pretty amazing program, easier and faster than anything
else for certain projects…I’m sure when you first saw Maya, it was
like peering into another world, the virtual world of 3D animation. I
can’t comment on JewelCad because I’ve never really explored it.

However, I also find ZBrush very interesting, but upon first glance,
it also looks daunting… someone once mentioned that navigating the
interface is like wrestling with a bag of badgers, but that may have
been an exaggeration! It’s what you’re used to, that determines your
comfortability with a program. I’ve hesitated to get into ZBrush,
primarily because it has no measuring tools that I know of. How is
Maya, for accuracy of dimension?

I recently bought Silo, which will have displacement painting in the
next version, which I’m hoping will function like ZBrush but the
advantage would be that it’s in a full 3D environnment.

So, I’ll be able to import a Rhino model and give it a texture in
Silo, but I don’t see it as a practical program to build a base
model. Perhaps in a few versions down the road…

http://www.nevercenter.com/silo/silo_20/

It’s true that the algorithms for CAD have been around for a while,
but perhaps a significant market potential has lagged behind in the
jewelry industry until somewhat recently. Otherwise, you’d think that
the developers of Maya or 3ds Max would have built jewelry plugins
long before other 3D software developers created CAD programs for
jewelry designers.

Regards,
Jesse Kaufman
www.jdkjewelry.com

3

Yes, I took computer science way before the invention of the PC. We
used punch cards and BASIC. I owned the 2nd, pc, the XT. It was
fully loaded - 64k and 2 DRIVES!!! Cost me 800 bucks, and took me 3
days to figure out how to run a program. All of which is leading up
to the statement that Maya is the most complex computer program that
I have ever encountered. I don’t use it for the purpose of jewelry
design - I use it for the purpose of 3d art as a whole - and also
animation. ZBrush, though, is a whole nuther thing. ZBrush barely
measures at all, but it does export.obj (Maya - Lightwave) and.dxf
files. But it is simply the most intuitive sculpting program on the
planet. The interface is unusual, but it’s not so hard once you learn
some basics - as with all programs the deeper things are, well,
deeper. You draw an object, and then you must hit, “edit”, or the
next click will freeze your object and draw another one- that’s what
most people have trouble with. For those who don’t know, though–
Imagine you have a piece of virtual clay of a shape hanging in front
of you, and a wand that you can push, pull and manipulate it, always
being able to turn it any way, all in real time. Plus textures,
colors, an on and on. IMHO (George Lucas announced adding it to
LucasFilms workflow, too) it is the future of 3d graphics, plain and
simple.