How to Use CAD to Design Jewelry

Long gone are those days when jewelry was practiced by grey-bearded craftsmen sitting on ancient workbenches handling antique tools.

Even just a few decades ago, a jewelry designer needed to have expertise in lots of architectural and functional knowledge of materials and draw heavily detailed technical sketches in order to begin the process of crafting a piece of jewelry.

But that focus is slowly turning around, nowadays, usage of 3D CAD is taking over, and providing a method of quick and precise design, allowing jewelers to efficiently play around with a 3D model of their ideas where they can freely modify and preview their creations.

You too can create beautiful pieces, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t ever sat behind a jewelry workbench. This would have been unimaginable decades ago.

Do you need to be an expert CAD drafter to design jewelry? Well, the answer is no, but you still need to gather a little knowledge about jewelry design to learn what is aesthetically pleasing and learn how to use a 3D Jewelry CAD software, but if you’ve got good Solidworks skills, that’s fine too.

After that, you’ll be ready to make intricate, beautiful pieces in no time, with just a few steps to take into consideration. At JCAD, we’ll be happy to aid you in every step of the way if you find the process overwhelming and would like to outsource your jewelry design instead.

1. Concept:

Every creative design starts with one thing; inspiration. The first step is to idealize a concept about what you want to create, this concept will develop and evolve as it goes through the creation process, and it largely has to adapt to any boundaries you may find along the way, such as color availabilities, stylings, material costs and properties. If you’ll be printing a test model, then you also need to consider 3D printing limitations, and to coordinate the above requirements within your expected budget for design and production.

2. Model:

Now that you have set a general idea, and established a basic concept of your creation, you need to do the actual modeling. If you are a complete newcomer to this, it might be easier to get a grasp on drawing by starting to use a 2D design software, like Photoshop or Corel, or even a 2D CAD program. But eventually, you’ll need to get a 3D CAD software. Essentially the difference between 2D and 3D design is just that 3D design is 2D design extracted in space.

Although there are lots of software programs to choose from, it mostly depends on what you want to do and the level of experience you have as to which you choose. Check out our other blog posts for some recommendations.

CAD Jewelry software costs can run anywhere from $800 to $5000, with some of them having payment and financing plans for purchasing their professional licenses.

We highly recommend however that you outsource this process for maximum time and cost efficiency. Contact us on 1.888.202.2052 or through email at jason@jcadusa.com for more information on starting that process.

If you have designed a concept for your creation, but don’t have a way of modeling it on CAD software yourself, we have top-quality and experienced designers ready to help you bring your ideas to reality.

3. Print:

After your design is done, you can render it to produce a photorealistic image for further use, or you can 3D print your jewelry piece. This is the easiest way of producing a physical model or a mold of your jewel to use in manufacturing. Not everyone has a 3D Printer, but we’ve got your back in case you don’t.

At JCAD-Inc. we’ll give you the most cost-effective tools to achieve your jewelry creation objectives all the way from prototype marketing to mass manufacturing and production.