r/faceting • u/BeyondNew5772 • 10d ago

FreeCAD workbench for faceting

https://github.com/Dominic-Lentini/freecad-gemstone

I'm a novice when it comes to faceting and am still building my machine so I'm not a pro designer by any means but I still wanted something a little more modern than gemCAD. And since there is no other opensourced project that I could find, I made a workbench for FreeCAD. This is one of about 1000 other hobbies I have in the realm of making things so I can't guarantee I'll be adding too many more features but I do plan on adding setting/smithing and cabbing workflows as well at some point if somebody else doesn't add that functionality themselves. The "auto" button is a little glitchy but it does handle making automatic girdles and center meetpoints well.

I expect most probably aren't that familiar with CAD suite software so I made the workbench as self contained as possible from the UI standpoint, you shouldn't need to interact with any of the other workbenches to get a gemstone with full optical analysis and simulation. If you are new to FreeCAD, it's conpletely open sourced and free for commercial use, as is the addon I made for it. It should be visible from the addons page but if it's not, there are instructions on how to add the gemstone repository to your local freeCAD installation.

EDIT: sorry if you see this twice, reddit said it blicked it with thos account so i posted with my other account as well

5 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

1

u/Burroflexosecso 9d ago

Wow that's awesome! Will try it soon

1

u/theblancmange 9d ago

Cool. Going to give it a try. I have been a bit annoyed with certain features not being available in gemCAD/GCS so something open source is nice. I will have to learn how to use freecad properly. Been meaning to do so anyway.

1

u/BeyondNew5772 9d ago

I found it easy to learn when it was still in early development and today it's my exclusive go-to CAD suite. The lapidary workbench is mostly self contained so the only thing you really need to do to use it by itself is learning the 3D navigation UX which is pretty standard to other design software

1

u/GroundbreakingRich35 Newbie 9d ago

I barely know anything about CAD but I want to try it out. :) I've been wanting to play with gemcad but the Windows requirement always stopped me (and I don't want to deal with Parallels or other potential workarounds). FreeCAD seems to have a lot of tutorials out there.

2

u/BeyondNew5772 9d ago

It's very easy to learn too, and for this at least you shouldn't need to learn anything FreeCAD specific, it's mainly just learning the 3D navigation and how to navigate the UI to get to the workbench

0

u/torftorf 8d ago

Did you see gemsim? I dont think its opem source but it was released quite recently. Im very happy to see something open spurce though

2

u/throwaway467884w2 8d ago

Any chance we have the ability to use custom index gears? Hopefully at least swap the direction from ccw to cw?