Jewelry Design Software For 3d Printing

Designing and creating jewelry is an extremely complex and intricate process. However, the best jewelry design software now make the process easier than ever before to create stunningly beautiful jewelry designs that match your creativity.

With jewelry design software, you can design with pinpoint accuracy, make unlimited revisions and use a huge variety of design tools to help you realize your creative vision. From creating organic shapes to designing geometric jewels, the possibilities are endless.

Once you have a complete design, you can then send it to a resin 3D printer which will then print high detailed wax models to use with investment casting precious metals. This means that, with the right software, designing and creating jewelry is more accurate and efficient than ever before.

There are various options when it comes to 3D jewelry design software. You can go for a specialist solution, although these are often expensive and cost upwards of $5,000.

If you aim to design jewelry professionally, we recommend premium software — these professional tools offer specialist jewelry designing capabilities that streamline the process, bring more versatility, and if you're designing jewelry that will sell for thousands, it only makes sense to equip yourself with the best possible tools.

The alternative is to go for general CAD software that has the right tools to allow you to design jewelry. These types of software can be purchased for much less and there are even top programs available for free. We have also included some free jewelry design software you can try out.

Whether you're a beginner or a professional, we're here to help you choose the best jewelry design software for you. We've done our research and picked out the top programs available right now, from free solutions to expert software.

Best Paid Jewelry Design Software

Rhino 7 – Professional Jewelry Design Software with SubD Geometry

Price: $1,181

Rhino 7 is one of the more affordable professional jewelry design software, though it's still a very useful option.

Rhino is a well known software in the jewelry industry and the 7th version is its most significant update so far. One of the most impressive features is the new subdivision (SubD) geometry type which allows you to create editable, accurate organic shapes very quickly. This combines free form accuracy with quick editing – something other geometry types don't.

This software offers designers great freedom, with the ability to model using NURBs, measure mass properties, and visualize changes in real time. You can also create high quality renders of your designs using Rhino 7.

While Rhino 7 itself isn't specifically designed for jewelry design, it's compatible with several industry standard plugins that are perfect for desiging both custom pieces and jewelry for mass manufacturing.

These include Panther3D, a complete CAD toolset for jewelry design and manufacturing, and 2Shapes, which is a user-friendly solution that helps you optimize costs and boost sales by improving customers' online shopping experience.

You can also integrate Rhino 7 with CounterSketch, which boasts a library of over 1,200 adjustable jewelry design elements, and MatrixGold, the latter of which you can read more about below.

Jewelry CAD Dream – Excellent Morphing, Setting & Cutting Tools

Price: $5,850 + $35 remote installation fee

Jewelry CAD Dream jewelry design software

Jewelry CAD Dream is developed by professionals with over 30 years of experience in the jewelry design industry and is one of the most popular solutions out there among professional jewelry designers.

With Jewelry CAD Dream, you can benefit from a fantastic variety of advanced tools designed to help you create stunning jewelry. For starters, there's a range of morphing tools and direct editing features that are ideal for creating flowing, organic shapes. Wraps, patterns, inlays, bending, embossing – there are loads of great tools to choose from.

We particularly liked the range of specific pavé tools on this jewelry design software for 3D printing. These include baguette arrays, jelly pavé surfaces and multiple row pavé, which are super helpful for creating original gem-encrusted pieces for any type of gem setting.

There's also a great selection of easy-to-use setting tools, including bezels, wire settings and prongs, you can edit setting parameters until you have exactly what you want. Jewelry CAD Dream's cutting tools, including azure cutters and honeycomb cutters, makes life easier for bench workers as well as designers.

This 3D jewelry design software also has a fully associative, dynamic history. This allows complete customization throughout every phase of the design process, helping you maximize efficiency and productivity.

With the fast live render feature, you can visualize your piece at any time. There's also the Thea Render add-on for creating photorealistic visuals you can use to showcase your designs. Once you're finished with the design process, you can easily export your designs as STL files for 3D printing.

The Jewelry CAD Dream software comes with a 24-lesson training course along with over 100 video tutorials, which really help overcome the learning curve. There's also the option to upgrade to advanced training.

Firestorm CAD – Best 3D CAD Software for Jewelry with Direct Modeling

Price: $6,500

Developed by 3D Space Pro, Firestorm CAD is a powerful 3D jewelry CAD software designed to help jewelry makers sell custom designs with maximum efficiency. This software is notable for being the only direct modeling jewelry CAD software around.

Direct modeling is similar to parametric modeling – used by most other jewelry design software – but is more advanced, allowing you to directly change the geometry and properties of a design by pushing, pulling and twisting.

In parametric modeling, on the other hand, a design's final geometry is built into the steps that create the model, meaning you need to edit the interim model stages. This makes Firestorm CAD ideal for creating organic shapes to use in your jewelry design.

Firestorm CAD boasts a huge library with over 4,000 jewelry components you can use in your designs. It also has some excellent stone layout tools that allow you to set diamonds along a line and pave a surface.

This makes Firestorm CAD a particularly useful tool if you're working with diamonds, with over 320 different-sized diamond layouts to work with.

This 3D jewelry design software has a user-friendly interface and a relatively short learning curve compared to other professional jewelry design programs. There are educational resources to help you understand the software, and you can also book training sessions.

If you're involved with marketing and selling jewelry, Firestorm CAD has a web-based Gallery app that displays custom designs in 3D animation. You can use this on a website to advertise your designs, and it provides a full 360-degree view that can be used on a touchscreen display.

MatrixGold with Rhinoceros – Overall Best Jewelry Design Software

Price: $7,900 ($3,995 with existing Matrix & Rhino licenses)

MatrixGold is a combination of two previously separate software – Matrix and RhinoGold – and is widely regarded as the industry leader when it comes to custom jewelry design software.

Developed by the Stuller company Gemvision, MatrixGold offers a fantastic range of tools for professional jewelry designers. For example, the 3D texturing feature allows you to apply textures and reliefs from the MatrixGold library to give your jewelry distinctive designs.

Thanks to the Smart Pattern library, you can apply over 90 solid patterns to any surface. You can even add multiple patterns, helping to create truly unique designs. We also like that you can automatically add gems between two curves, with the ability to instantly select the height, curve offset and the distance between the two curves.

While this custom jewelry design software is perfect for creating your own designs from scratch, it also has a Content Manager with prebuilt bases that you can use to speed up the process. There's even a signet ring builder tool that can save you loads of time when creating corporate jewelry and class rings.

We also like that MatrixGold has a fully fledged rendering studio. With this, you can create stunning high resolution images and videos of your jewelry – perfect for advertising your products online.

There's also Alpha Channels rendering which allows you to render individual parts and put them together later in a photo editing software, which is useful for doing several iterations of one design with varying metal colors and stones.

3Design – Highly Advanced Jewelry CAD Software for Professionals

Price: Available upon quote

3Design is another highly advanced jewelry CAD software that is designed for professional designers. This program has been around for over 20 years and is used by jewelry designers across the world.

There's a wide variety of powerful 3Design features that can help bring even the most complex design ideas to life. For example, with the advanced bypass builder, you can easily adjust the parameters of rails and automatically achieve a swept bypass shank. You can then wrap your shank around the center stone setting with the curved and bending feature.

The 3Design jewelry design software also boasts several features specifically designed to make create certain types of jewelry easier. There's a parametric bracelet builder, a honeycomb ajar feature that helps you create beautiful patterns on the underside of rings, and a halo ring construction tool – to name just a few.

If you're looking to render your designs, DeepImage is a dedicated rendering add-on for 3Design that can help you create photorealistic images of your jewelry. There's also a reporting tool that allows you to add company logos to customizable reports and add information like cost per material.

We also really like the intuitive interface of 3Design that's specifically designed to mimic a jewelry's environment on the workbench. The platform is fully customizable, and with the quick access toolbar you can easily drop and drag your favorite tools.

As it's a fairly complex jewelry CAD software, 3Design offers expert technical training to help you get to grips with it as soon as possible.

While 3Design doesn't openly display it's pricing – you need to fill out a contact form if you're interested in purchasing the software – a typical license costs around $6,000.

Best Free Jewelry Design Software

TinkerCAD – Best Free Jewelry Design Software for Beginners

TinkerCAD is a CAD software that isn't specific to jewelry design, but it still has the tools needed to be an effective option.

Developed by Autodesk, this free jewelry design software is fairly basic in comparison to the other programs on our list, but it's an excellent choice for beginners. It's also a great choice for kids and teachers of jewelry design.

It's incredibly easy to use TinkerCAD – you simply place a shape to add or remove material, move rotate and adjust your shape as you wish, and then group together a set of shapes to create your desired model.

You can then easily export your design as an STL file to 3D print it. Alternatively, you can export your model as an SVG file for laser cutting.

TinkerCAD has a selection of lessons that teach you how to design certain models. These include lessons for designing band rings, heart rings, diamond rings and more. In the gallery section, you can check out jewelry designs created by other TinkerCAD users.

You can also design 3D objects with code using TinkerCAD. You simply stack coding blocks together into shapes by dragging and dropping them, reorder blocks to define your design, and then run the code and watch your creation come to life!

Blender – Advanced Free Jewelry CAD Software

Like TinkerCAD, Blender isn't specifically aimed at general jewelry designers – there are very few free solutions that are. However, it is widely regarded as one of the best open-source CAD software and can be a very powerful tool for a jewelry designer.

This jewelry CAD software is well known for its powerful modeling tools, such as its modifiers. These are automatic operations that allow you to perform a wide range of effects, such as subdivision surfaces, much quicker and without affecting the base geometry of your models.

There are several free Blender add-ons that are specifically designed for jewelry design. For example, JewelCraft is an add-on that offers a variety of tools for data gathering, jeweling and asset management to help you optimize Blender for jewelry design.

Blender is also a powerful rendering tool thanks to Cycles, its ray-trace-based render engine. With this, you can create incredibly realistic images so that you can visualize and showcase your jewelry designs.

This free jewelry design software is very intuitive with keyboard shortcuts to help create fast workflows, although it does have a steep learning curve, so it can take new users a little while to get to grips with it. But when you do, it's an extremely powerful free software for jewelry design.

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