u/JanntheSeal

Hi everyone,

we currently use Rhino 8 as our main CAD software for jewelry design and are now looking into expanding our workflow with additional plugins or specialized jewelry CAD tools.

So far we have looked at:

• CrossGems
• Grasshopper Gold
• RhinoArtisan
• 3Design

Our current impression:

• CrossGems looks modern and very strong for parametric workflows
• Grasshopper Gold seems extremely flexible and affordable
• RhinoArtisan looks very production-oriented with a fast workflow
• 3Design seems more like the large enterprise / luxury jewelry solution

What matters most for us:

• fast workflow for jewelry design
• parametric workflows and easy variations
• strong Rhino 8 integration
• suitable for small to medium-scale production
• minimal unnecessary overhead
• stable software and active community
• good learning curve
• suitable for training apprentices and junior designers internally
• tools that new employees can realistically learn without extremely long onboarding

Budget is flexible if the productivity increase actually justifies the cost.

Would love to hear real-world experiences from people actually working professionally in jewelry CAD.

A few questions:

1. What are you currently using professionally together with Rhino?
2. Which plugins or workflows saved you the most time?
3. Would you stay with Rhino + plugins, or move directly to something like 3Design or MatrixGold?
4. Are there any underrated plugins or tools we should absolutely look into?

We are also interested in opinions about:

• Panther
• MatrixGold
• Clayoo
• T-Splines-style workflows
• rendering / CAM / 3D print workflows

We want to avoid investing heavily into software that ultimately does not improve productivity much compared to pure Rhino.

Would really appreciate honest feedback from people working in custom jewelry, production, or serial manufacturing.