Carolina da Costa Nascimento Mantovani
B211-500CAD3+555CAD3 / 2021-22
Nowadays, to successfully produce a large scale batch of jewelry as well as to guarantee its preciseness, jewelers models rings, bracelets, earrings and pendants in Rhinoceros with the help of Grasshopper and the Peacock plugin. With those tools he can not only create the desired piece of jewelry as well as replicate is as many times as needed to produce as much as intended in the easiest way possible, through a wax 3d models linked to a wax tree. With my Project, I intend to briefly show its process and how these tools help with modern jewelry as we know. By the end of the process I’ll not only have a ring and the Wax Tree ready to create three rings but I’ll also show how the program helps jewelers to easily price its work.
Steps:
The first step would be creating the ring (for example) using the Gauge command from Peacock and set the intended parameters with the plane xz and number sliders that will determine the sizing system and the size of the rings to be produced in this wax tree.
The second step would be to create the model of the ring. In this case I chose to create a twisted gold band model called croissant ring. In this step I had to determine how many twists the ring would have with the PFrames command and its smoothness with the Multiplication command (radians x number slider).
Since the desired voronoi ring has its top side thicker than the other sides, an attractor point was set over the top side of the ring to create this thicker top look.
To create the initial volume and a closed surface it was needed a Loft command with its Loft Options command to set through Toggles the volumetric parameters.
To set points on the rings surface to receive the voronoi mesh the Populate Geometry (Popgeo) was used, followed by the Bounding Box command to bound the Voronoi 3D used next.
Linking the Loft and Voronoi 3D to Brep/Brep command we finally have the ring “skeleton”.
The next step is to offset the voronoi lines, creating the width of the rings veins with the following commands:
Finally, to set the material of the ring, the Metal Preview command from the Peacock plugin was used as well as a number slider command with eleven numbers to choose from, each a different material like for example yellow gold, white gold, rose gold, silver, copper and platinum.
To create the Wax Tree I used the Tree Wax command from Peacock. This command has multiple inlet parameters to fill. The most important ones to get the command working are the Geometry, linked to the previously designed ring; then the reference start point; vector; number of branches, width of the trunk and branches and at last an activate solid tree inlet with its toggle. From this command there’s three outlets created, the curves, the geometry and the solid tree itself. The last two along the ring geometry links to the Insert in Tree command from Peacock finally creating the geometric view of the final product desired in this project.
This last step post geometry is the one that helps the jewelers estimate the cost of producing these rings.
On the top group, with the Costs command from Peacock, it was set the weight based on the volume created times the weight of the chosen metal in grams/cm₃, the amount of trees (1) and the cost of the material in €/gram (50.198€ in 04/02/2022), resulting in the material cost for the whole tree with three rings in 11150.44 €. This cost includes the amount of gold used for the tree trunk and branches, when detached from the rings will be perfectly able to be once again be melted and create new wax trees.
On the bottom group the same process repeated itself, with the difference that the volume of the tree is not considered and it will only calculate the value of one ring. The Cost command also allows the jeweler to put a price of his labor/hour and amount of hour worked, as well as mold and prototype cost and gain percentage into the final cost of the ring.
Final Results:
Voronoi Ring
Voronoi Ring Wax Tree
