Band

Comment

Comment by Mark on December 14, 2010 at 10:10am

This one in particular took weeks due to a patent process and many meetings.

A project takes from one to three days but without the flexibility of a System for producing all the variables needed to cover your production's needs.

 

In this forum there are high level professional with great knowledge of geometry and mathematics (not me...) but they would be stunned to see what goes into a ring.

It is not just the Ring but how the ring needs to morph in order to cover the numerous needs of sizes and relationships. Some are in the hundreds. Imagine a building which needs to transform based on each individual tenants!  Height, size, windows (shape, number etc.), rooms, entrances, wall thickness, some floor one way, other floors following different a pattern or no pattern.

Some is logical, some is money, some is fashion.... endless.

All of this on the fly! Not days, MINUTES!

 

All this (ideally) needs to be built in the definition and thoroughly set at the beginning.

 

My wish is to have more jewelers joining this forum so that I can learn also from others.

I taught  CAD to jewelers and non-jewelers for 15 years and every time I learned something valuable from other people's brain.

Right now my wish is to learn scripting so that I can follow others in their exploration of GH.

 

Another wish I have for GH is to have the Slider capable of inputs to control their Low and High values.

This would eliminate a lot of work for the jewelers. We have way too many relationship  that need to be controlled at the input level.

 

I did request David an option as such with more details, but as of now I would be happy if only this two aspects could be implemented.

It can create loops, I think, but he can manage a way around it. He's capable.

That guy is very brilliant.

 

I will try to request it again on this two points only:

Inputs for Low and High values in the Slider.

 

Comment by Jesse Kaufman on December 13, 2010 at 8:09pm

 Great to see GH being used for jewelry production! It's wonderful to have the ability to quickly modify the many variables of a particular ring style in terms of finger size, prong dimension, gemstone size, etc. So, I'm curious to know the average time it would take to set up a ring project that is not such a basic design? I'll look forward to seeing the definitive explanations you're planning to post on how you accomplish this work.

 

Comment by Mark on December 3, 2010 at 8:36am

It's an in-house product and this is the most I could publish.
What you see is crippled down version just to give an idea of the type of band that it's generated.
There are manufacturing secrets that are invisible in the picture.
So what you see it's a common band that has lost all those characteristics of the original in order to protect the process.

We also did an "invisible setting" prototype which has built in Flexibility.
If you are in the jewelry industry you would know what I mean and it is close to a miracle.

It's a shame I can not share details and this is why I am planning my next major work on something 10 times more complex then this, at least.
It's will be for my own business and for the jewelry industry as well.

I hate to tease people and then not to be able to produce anything more than an image.
But I thought it would be better than nothing, at least for jeweler designers, so they can see that there are more and more users and that complexity it is not something to shy away from, and it's worth the time spent because the returns on production are far larger than for special orders and this is why GH is useful.

We can design a piece of jewelry usually in less then 1 hour, hence GH is not really worth the time.
But for production with so many variables (Finger sizes controlling most of the outcome together with stone sizes etc.) then GH it's a MUST!

I really appreciate everyone's comments and suspicions and I understand why.
99% of the people out there do not really understand the complexity of jewelry at the industrial level. It' s not just form but the post-production that's the killer.

This industry it's still an hybrid of technology and art with, and due to the lack of the old school pros, unfortunately, we face very lousy and unpredictable execution in the post production (after the casting process). This leaves you with a design process and intention that requires a lot of control over every possible variant of the object.
One wrong design aspect it's multiplied thousands of times at the benches (for every single piece) = bad profits!

It sound more serious that it is but very few companies are willing to do so (delivering good product vs low quality and this also happens because the consumer is not longer aware of the difference. So, who does keep quality, it's only because of integrity, third party QA or just pride).
This is way GH is invaluable. This is why that Def looks like out of proportion for that (Visual) simple band.
It is because there are dozens and dozens of variable effecting everything else. In fact it is not even complete as it is in order to cover everything but the most critical ones.

Sorry for the long replays. I am an instructor and a professional jeweler by trade since I was very young and I love to teach, so I overflow with explanations... and Components :)).

Next time it will be "in the open" as they say...

Comment by Garcia del Castillo on December 3, 2010 at 3:41am

Cool Mark, and don't feel stressed for the comments: the def looks great and I personally love to see work so industry-oriented. It's just that we also want to understand the complexity lying beneath the apparent simplicity.

Do you have pics of a real-world prototype out of this definitoon?

Comment by Mark on December 1, 2010 at 8:46pm

I think it's elaborated but not really complicated.
The amount of components (about 1100 last time I counted them) it's due to the extensive number of variables in the construction of the ring.
I don't know if it's common knowledge but in the PD of jewelry, for large scale production, the options are in the dozens if not in the hundreds as in a 3 stone ring (that's my next quest and believe me it is extremely complex and elaborated) which, if you do not draw the line somewhere, you could end up with a definition 10 times as big. I could make a list of the preliminary factors and you could begin to understand at least this one presented here, that looks simple but is not.
If you are a real jeweler and know how many details (interdependent with each others) are needed in order to cover unpredictable factors and lousy tolerances then you'll begin to cover an overextended territory.

For example: if you get to certain stone size then the prongs need to change, but not the bezels, and the bite for setting can go for technical integrity up to a point, because then the look is not appropriate.
If the metal it's platinum you can leave some things as they are but interconnections for metal flow has to change in some area but not if it is in gold.
Some stone count may not fit a particular finger size without going too high or too low, so the bezels need to compensate for this in thickness and visual relationship between them so that when I input a different finger size GH knows what to do based on many more factors etc. etc.
The fact that all geometry is in GH accounts for so many more components.
All this needs to work across the definition, so that if I say this is the stone size I want, all the prongs will need to move apart to have the right bite but with a diameter that is not out of proportions otherwise the stones need automatically to move slightly apart. It's endless.
For this reason we needed to define the market expectations (and have all controls for those ones in GH) and leave the eccentric to a manual manipulation.

Grasshopper it's a hell of a tool to transfer my 40 years of jewelry making (since a little boy :)
but I think I am using maybe 20% of its power.

We used SolidThinking because of the construction tree but there is nothing like Rhino and GH combined!

I wish I was free to share this definition in order to learn from advanced minds here but this time I can't. The next one will be mine (intellectual and technical property) and I can't wait to see how other will take it to the next level.
That's the best way to learn.

Comment by Kamil Kiendzierski on December 1, 2010 at 4:34pm

It looks too complicated ;]

Comment by Mark on December 1, 2010 at 4:04pm

There is more than what you see.
The baked band you see has been simplified to avoid certain processes of productions that made this project worthwhile the programming time.
The band is much more complex that the one you see here.
The end product would be what you see ( no cheating here ) but with many manufacturing aids removed. It's not just casting.
This is the reason why the definition is so complex.
The video would expose them and the in-house policies are against such.

I'm in the process of creating another definition for a more complex set up of manufacturing another classic type of ring that should cover almost anything feasible for it. That is a personal project that I will be able to share and video.

Not so soon though. May Grasshopper have mercy on me!

Thank you for your comments. This forum is awesome and a great learning place for me.

Comment by Ángel Linares on December 1, 2010 at 3:26pm

Really complex definition...and a really simple form. I vote for that video :)

Comment by Mark on December 1, 2010 at 11:00am

This definition has no input geometry. Everything in generated within Grasshopper.

It is fairly complex because it allows every single detail to be changed and the combination are enormous but still within the limit of what is feasible for this kind of jewelry piece.

The option complexity are just variable of Prongs height, diameter, angle, depth, position relative to stones, shape for cleaning compensation,etc.

The bezels have the issue of thickness, distance from eachother or total height, holes diameter and conical data, oversize for cleaning etc.

Then everything is subject to the number of stones and their sizes and the distance from Girdle to Girdle and from the bezel after setting, and it has to be done in Grasshopper in order to the create the band on those requirements in conjunction with the metal parts requirements.

The worse part was the shank (not shown ) because at that time (GH v5x) there were missing components needed for two step process that I did not want to do because my goal is to have everything done in Grasshopper without any imported geometry or Bake and Back.

I am sure that I could do this with less components in v8 and with my updated knowledge of GH and probably even less with an in depth skill of scripting which I am approaching just now.

But I wish I had the deep knowledge of some of the users in this forum. It could be so much more fun indeed!

For the video, I am restricted by certain factor...

Comment by Karina Teixeira on December 1, 2010 at 10:17am

Wooow... Amazing!

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