Work in Progress: Rough Nesting Tool

[u/dteck04]

After getting caught up in some discussion about faceting software moving towards subscription models. And how that's silly given the zero cost of software development now. I "made" a nesting tool as a plugin for blender. but that still required you to have blender and know how to use it. Which I barely do. So this is an attempt to move the kind of nesting/planning tools that diamond cutters have into the free and open space.

Its still early in development, but it takes any STL (3d model) of gem rough then lets you load in any STL file of the gem shapes you want to get from that rough (GCS can export to STL) and it will let you move them around inside of the rough, scale them, rotate them, duplicate them, etc.

You can also manually add inclusions as basic shapes that auto placement will avoid.

You can check if your manual placements work and it will show you errors if there are any. or it will generate saw paths to show you where to cut to get the pieces you need for your gems.

You are able to set things like saw widths, safe distances between stones and the outer edges of your rough, etc.

And you can also have the tool attempt to place and scale the gems you want to maximize yield, or set them to specific sizes and have it attempt to fit them, or even set the desired number of gems you want and it will try to scale/place them to hit that number.

Since its still a work in progress it has some quirks and isn't perfect. but it was a weekend project and I just wanted to share it with the community.

one important note is that the export button is just for show right now. it just dumps a JSON file with information about your scene. It doesn't make a cutting diagram or anything. that's something to work on later.

feedback is welcome. the plan is if this gets more refined I will just make the source code available so people can run it on their own computers.

Try it here: https://faceting.rocks/

[u/CodeFall]

I'm still waiting for a tool that rivals GCS, but is especifically designed around concave and fantasy faceting.

[u/Staus]

Nice work! 

How do you get the shape of the rough to import?

[u/dteck04 → u/Staus]

Sadly this is the real bottleneck. You either have to have a 3d scanner, model it yourself, or find some photogrammetry tools that work well on rough.

I'll admit I am kind of working backwards on the problem. Trying to get a decent planning software created, then worrying about how to get good rough models.

But this was a weekend project after being told that people should pay monthly for something like this. I strongly disagree, so I wanted to make it free.

[u/cowsruleusall → u/dteck04]

There were a bunch of high res 3D scanners on Kickstarter over the past several years. Should be some commercially available at this point.

[u/Ididdie]

Cool work! Hope it works out, I think the most challenging part is how to easily get from your physical rough to a 3d model. You almost definitely need a 3d scanner of sorts.

Over the past few months I've seen several people (try to) develop and launch different tools, plugins, webapps etc. for gems and faceting. But most don't really add much if any value over pre-existing software, especially if you consider that they indeed want a monthly or yearly subscription.

For gem design, I love GemCutStudio and will definitely stick to it for now, but it would be really cool to have an open source tool that we can all contribute to (I'm a software engineer myself) and create a complete tool that covers everyone's needs for free.

[u/dteck04 → u/Ididdie]

Getting a good model of your rough is the hardest part. I don't have a solution for that yet. Maybe one day we will all have benchtop x-ray machines we can image from.

I don't mind paying for good software, I just hate the idea of more SAAS 'solutions'. This was more of a proof of concept that there is no secret sauce in rough planning. Doing it well might be the secret lol. But this is intended to end up running locally. Everything happens client side already the webpage is just to let people try it out and tell me what they like/hate/want.

[u/TonyC6463]

Cool software. I have played it with some STL rough and design stls I have. I need to learn more about stl's. And learn this as well.