Post subject: Re: Another "new gem design app" thread
Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 4:24 pm
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Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2016 7:58 pm Posts: 1424 Location: San Marcos, CA
Alex, Out of curiousity, what sort order did you have set in Gemcad when saved. I find this can affect certain designs when i open in in my Jang. Just a thought. May help Rej track a solution to the possible bug. Greg
Post subject: Re: Another "new gem design app" thread
Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 10:54 pm
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Joined: Thu Nov 10, 2016 11:29 pm Posts: 114 Location: Brisbane, Australia
Thanks for the info Alex.
I'm still trying to figure out what happened so bear with me. Correct me if I'm wrong but...
If I fire up gemcad and cut my first tier at 43deg, it gets listed under CROWN in the instructions. If I then cut another at 90 to define a girdle cut somewhere in the middle, the CROWN listing changes to PREFORM until I transfer and cut the first actual crown facet. Can you confirm this is what you're seeing on your end too?
Now in your case you stopped after cutting your first side and girdle (which gemcad calls a preform in that particular case and lumps 90deg cuts in with it), but the way gemcad works is that the side you're cutting is always the crown. I.e: there is no pavilion until you transfer. I'm sure like me you've had the frustration of going to print a design where you tweaked something on the pavilion, only to have to cancel out of the print because it's upside down.
I suspect this just a special case of Gemcad saying "if there are only cuts to one side + girdle, call it "preform" and group all tiers into that header. (It doesn't differentiate between a crown preform and a pavilion preform). The angles Gemcad sees are still on the crown side, it just displays them as something different.
Now when I load the file, I don't have a "preform" special case. The angles I read which are on the crown side get put there and the 90deg get put into the pavilion.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not really a bug as far as I can see, were both seeing the same data, just interpreting it differently. Gemcad calls it a bunch of cuts under a preform heading, I've split them up.
Two possible solutions: 1 - I do the same as Gemcad and call it a preform in that particular case but that probably wouldn't fix the situation that the side you're working on when you save in Gemcad gets assigned crown angles so would be still loaded on the wrong side in GemCutStudio
2 - Offer a "transfer" function of my own, which you could just do in your case and everything would pick up as you'd expect. (the girdle tiers would group back in with the now-pavilion tiers)
#2 should only take a few hours to implement anyway and would be handy for other use-cases too i reckon.
Rej, you are correct, I did not even notice it was listed as "Preform" in Gemcad. This makes sense. I think option 2 would be the best if it would allow things to regroup correctly. But once I get real familiar and comfortable with your program I am not sure how much i will use Gem Cad. Also, switching between them I am sure is not something you had planned on.
Post subject: Re: Another "new gem design app" thread
Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 5:39 am
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Joined: Thu Nov 10, 2016 11:29 pm Posts: 114 Location: Brisbane, Australia
That's a beautiful result Gene, thanks for sharing. Is the concave green tourmaline you posted in the other thread based on this same design?
Now that you've had a bit more time with the app and created a design with it, any extra feedback to pass on for usability? Workflow better or worse than Gemcad?
Post subject: Re: Another "new gem design app" thread
Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 3:31 am
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Joined: Tue Jul 02, 2013 9:00 am Posts: 1322 Location: Wylie Texas but in Alaska for a while
Summary of comments trying to create an oval.
Agree with a previous comment, it would be nice to set a l/w directly and have the rough adjust
I did have problems getting the rough to the shape. I adjusted the girdle first, but it ended up being to small. So I had to adjust the girdle again, and it took a few iterations to get the size big enough Comment no 2: I ended up adding a number facets with symmetry of 2 to get the design to work. Each time the angle defaulted back to 42 degrees. It would have been nice if it remembered the last value used.
The main view ended up being off-centered. It would be noce to be able to pan the view and then lock it in. My eyes are not as good as they use to be, and I end up having to zoom in to see what is happening.
Post subject: Re: Another "new gem design app" thread
Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 5:12 am
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Joined: Thu Nov 10, 2016 11:29 pm Posts: 114 Location: Brisbane, Australia
Thanks for the feedback.
About shaping the "rough". While I"m happy to add an option to pre-shape your rough when you start a new design, you must understand two things (which in all fairness aren't explained in the beta tutorial)
1 - There is no concept of fitting a design to a shape, well not really because the app always re-scales the design to fit the view. For example you can never create a tiny gem and waste rough. One of the sides will always be maximized to fit the view at normal zoom. Now if you use both sides of the initial block as part of your design, then yes I guess that's one way of fitting to a particular ratio, but I guess my intention was always that the user would cut past those in creating their design. It's not wrong to use them though. I'll try to add a popup or something you can use to set a starting ratio when making a new design. That might be what you guys are after.
2 - You should never run out of room for your design. The cube you start with is created from pre-exisisting cuts (see instruction when starting fresh). If you need to extend any side or the table for example, just select that face or tier and then Edit. You should be able to move it out and "create" more gem material. As long as the plane is still touching the rough, you should be able to then CUT and have more room to create your design. This process can be repeated with sides until you have enough starting rough again. I'm not sure if this is what you meant by your comment on the girdle being too small though, please let me know if there's another use-case I missed.
I'll try changing the angle slider to not reset after each cut on the next beta to see if that's better or if it creates other issues.
That's a beautiful result Gene, thanks for sharing. Is the concave green tourmaline you posted in the other thread based on this same design?
Now that you've had a bit more time with the app and created a design with it, any extra feedback to pass on for usability? Workflow better or worse than Gemcad?
This design is different than the concave cut one. For this design, I did use the rendering as a guide, and it ended up using deeper pavilion facets than I would have used normally for zircon, but they worked out well in the finished stone.
I like the workflow better than GemCAD, and the way you handle the cutting index, mirror and symmetry makes more sense to a cutter.
I’m on a Mac with it, so there is a problem where the backspace key doesn’t work. I think this is true for any fields where the user can type input.
Post subject: Re: Another "new gem design app" thread
Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 1:48 pm
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Joined: Thu Mar 13, 2014 5:15 am Posts: 19 Location: Austria
An option to see (or even better to set) the L/W ratio of a design would be a great feature. I´m cutting a lot of replacement stones for jewelry, where I always have to adapt designs to exact measurements. If I could see the length and width of the design in top view this would be very easy.
Another very useful feature would be a possibility to load images into the design window as a kind of background or overlay. This could be an image of a damaged stone that I want to copy, an outline or geometric shape, a piece of rough or even a jewelry setting for a stone. So it would be very easy to trace the outline of new design based on the underlying image. Of course this would only make sense in top view (direct view of the table) of the design.
the feedback from my first complete Gem Cut Studio workflow: The new program is an enormous timesaver!!! No more going back and forth between 3 different programs in the optimization process. I think I did it in less than half of the time it usually takes me to optimize a design - although everything was new to me and I had almost no experience with GCS. The tools are easy to use and self-explaining. And I even have to admit that I didn´t have the patience to watch the youtube tutorial in full length
The biggest struggle I have with the program is when I know 2 meet points and want the program to find either the index or angel. It seems it will way over cut a facet, and then if I Undo, it will undo the last complete good facet tier. It would be nice if you could select 2 or even 3 meet points, and have the program then display the angle and index, even if the index is a decimal index. It would then give you a starting index to use to make a facet that could work out.
Would it be possible to add the ability to not only snap to an intersection (point) or location of a line but to point transferred from another facet? Here I'm trying to cut a facet to form a level girdle but don't have a point that the actual facet would touch, but want it to be the same depth as the first set of crown facets.
Post subject: Re: Another "new gem design app" thread
Posted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 pm
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Joined: Thu Nov 10, 2016 11:29 pm Posts: 114 Location: Brisbane, Australia
Isn't there a point you can use at the rightmost end of the red line in your example? Where the last crown facet established the girdle level, where you'd presumably meet if you were cutting it.
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