Shiny things

[cahn]

I mentioned to karanguni on a post about crafting that (once when I had free time?) I play(ed) with blender to model jewelry that I then get Shapeways to print in metal, and she asked me if I had pics. (Tangentially, how do people get their pictures on DW? Is there a way I can do this easily directly from my phone? (I don't consider emailing it "easily."))

So... I started doing this because I really, really like gemstones. I have a bunch of (usually small, often synthetic and cheap, I'm not picky about provenance but SUPER picky about things like color and cut) stones and wanted to set them but I also have particular ideas about how to set them.

Here are four years' worth of playing with blender. (Not that I have 4 years worth of experience.. .it's more like one month of experience repeated a bunch of times... "play with it for a month, order some stuff, forget about it for a year, get reminded I like making shiny things, realize I've forgotten everything I know about blender, rinse and repeat.") I used the JewelCraft addon for almost all of these. Probably used other addons but that was the main one.

There is more but this was the stuff that was in my jewelry box.


Left: a brass (4,1) torus knot. (That means it goes around the torus four times "around the long way" and once "around the short way," if that makes sense.) It also was really easy to make, as blender tools has this built in, and looks really cool, I think. (ETA: I was reminded by comments that I should say this is not my original idea; I saw someone else do something similar and thought, hey, I could easily make that too!) Inside is a 5mm lab ruby sphere that can revolve freely, so it is very satisfying as kinetic jewelry (I wear it as a pendant with the chain looped through the middle). This is a terrible picture; it looks much better than this!
Center: Silver pendant for a cubic zirconia I had custom cut. I'm really pleased with how this one turned out.
Right: Pendant that was SUPPOSED to have garnets in the three places between the branches. Not happy about this one. I didn't make the stone prongs long enough and the garnets don't fit. I may buy some cheap lab rubies that are slightly smaller and set those instead, ugh because the whole point was to use up the garnets.

Left: Ring holding a color-change garnet. These are the coolest stones ever: purple in incandescent/halogen light, and bluish-green in daylight. SO COOL. Style is mimicking an etsy artist who no longer takes commissions on etsy (if she still did, I'd probably have got her to do this).
Center: yellow cz, this was a "tension"-esque setting (I'll show you the side in another pic). This was an interesting experiment but I don't think I'd do it again; it took forever to wedge the stone in I'm also unsure as to how stable it is.
Right: Plastic ring with a red spinel in it, I haven't printed this in silver yet.

Side views of the yellow cz and red spinel ring. You can see the yellow one came out kind of lumpy. This has to do with my using the blender "skin" modifier which sometimes gets confused. But anyway you can see that it's held in place by tension (although this is not what is called a true "tension" setting because of the bar underneath).

Bracelet I was working on a couple months ago but never got around to fixing. Stone is a precision cut garnet. This one I have to change to make the lines of it a bit less lumpy and also make it a bit bigger on my wrist.

The ring I started originally working in blender to make. Blue cz. This went through 11 iterations in plastic and a couple in silver (the other silver ones are holding other stones now). Many of the iterations were very very similar, I just... want things exactly so, sometimes.

Comments

[karanguni]

THIS IS ALL GORGEOUS

[cahn]

Thanks!! :D So the great thing is that Shapeways does all the hard parts -- I have never actually figured out how to polish a metal item really well, but they will polish it for you! (If you pay them extra :) ) (The torus knot and the tension ring were not polished.)

[antisoppist]

Shiny!

For photos, I now open a browser window on my phone, log into DW, go to Home - Upload images and then you can upload directly from your phone's images.

I then log in on the computer to do anything else with them but it gets them up there less painlessly than connecting my phone to my computer and copying them over. But there may be easier ways.

[ambyr]

I have the upload page bookmarked on my phone to save the step of finding the link to it, but otherwise, yeah.

[cahn]

Thank you! I now feel like it should have occurred to me to do this :)

[cahn]

Ohhhh, thank you! Yeah, the whole getting pics on my computer was the more annoying part, and yet it didn't occur to me to do this!

[isis]

Those are really pretty!

[cahn]

Thank you! :D

[schneefink]

Pretty :)

[cahn]

Thanks! :D

[rosefox]

Tangentially, how do people get their pictures on DW?

Upload to Flickr or Imgur, use their embed code.

[cahn]

Ah, thanks! I have never really looked into them (being usually more of a text-based person), but this is a good impetus to do so :D

[hamsterwoman]

These are so cool! I love the torus knot and especially the rose-looking CZ pendant setting -- it looks so elegant and dainty! And ooh, I didn't know about color-change garnets (even though the regular red garnets are my favorite gemstones), so I clearly need to look into that (that ring setting is also really, really cool!) And the "branch" setting for the garnets is so neat! I hope you find a way to use it that you like!

I also just didn't realize blender was a thing, although I've seen custom 3D printed jewelry at a craft fair (and kind of regret not splurging on it at the time)

For photos, I host mine of Flickr, which has a phone upload app / complete synch option, which works better some times than others, but it does bypass the need to get my phone hooked up to the laptop to get the photos off it, so even if I have to try more than once for a given photo (which sometimes I do), it's less hassle.

[cahn]

Thank you! The neat thing is that the things that look complicated are often a little easier to do in an algorithmic way -- like, if you look closely at the rose-like CZ pendant, it's really just four tilted circles. But it would be really hard to make something like this all by hand!

There are a bunch of programs for doing 3D modeling for jewelry, many of which are more specifically for jewelry, but blender has the advantage of being free :) Blender is kind of an all-purpose open-source tool for not just modeling but also animation and simulation (I've never really used those parts of it). There are people at my work who use it to model 3D scenes for various work projects, and I joke I'm the only person at work who learned how to use it... so I could make jewelry :)

I definitely have to check out Flickr!

[thistleingrey]

Very shiny! I like the torus knot, especially. (Gemstones are ... color to me, which means that other things with comparable depth or lucidity are ... fine?)

[cahn]

:D I should say (I will put it in the text above) that I saw a picture of something similar someone else made and I was like, hey, that's a torus knot, I could do that! :D

It turns out that color and transparency are very important to me! :) And for me practically speaking hardness is an issue -- I'm fairly hard on my jewelry. :) But that's why I have so much cubic zirconia and lab ruby/sapphire -- it's cheap and tough :)