Rhino, Matrix, Blender and the rest: which jewellery CAD software does what

If you outsource CAD work, the software your designer uses is not purely their business. It decides what format your files arrive in, whether they stay editable, and how easily the next person can pick up the work. Here is what the main options actually do.

Rhino

A general-purpose NURBS modeller and the foundation most jewellery CAD sits on. NURBS means true mathematical surfaces rather than a mesh, so curves stay curves at any scale and dimensions stay exact.

On its own Rhino has no jewellery-specific tools — no stone library, no prong generator. What it has is precision, stability and near-universal file compatibility. Most professional studios run Rhino with a jewellery plugin on top.

For you as a client: Rhino work exports cleanly to STEP as well as STL, which means the model stays editable by anyone downstream.

MatrixGold

Built on Rhino, aimed squarely at jewellery. Parametric stone setting, prong and head builders, gem libraries, automatic pavé layout, rail-based shank tools.

The advantage is speed on conventional work — a four-prong solitaire with a pavé shank can be built in a fraction of the time it would take from scratch. The trade-off is that heavily parametric files depend on MatrixGold to remain fully editable; exported as STEP or STL they are fine, but the build history does not travel.

RhinoGold and 3Design

RhinoGold occupies similar ground to MatrixGold, also on Rhino. 3Design is a separate parametric package with a strong following, particularly in Europe, and a history tree that makes revisions genuinely easy to trace.

Both are capable professional tools. The practical question is not which is better but whether whoever you commission can hand off a file the rest of your chain can use.

ZBrush

A digital sculpting tool, not a CAD package. It works in very high-density meshes and is unmatched for organic and figurative work — faces, animals, heavy texture, anything hand-modelled in feel.

It does not do precision. A ZBrush model has no exact dimensions in the CAD sense, so most studios sculpt in ZBrush and take the result back into Rhino for shanks, seats and anything that has to measure correctly.

Blender

Free, open source, and genuinely powerful — but a polygon modeller and renderer built for animation and visual effects, not manufacturing.

It can produce a printable mesh, and its rendering is excellent. What it cannot do natively is NURBS precision or parametric jewellery tooling. It is a reasonable choice for renders and for organic forms, a poor one for a calibrated pavé field.

JewelCAD

Long-established and still widely used in manufacturing, particularly across Asia. Fast for production work and familiar to a generation of designers. Its file handling is more closed than Rhino's, which matters if the model needs to move between studios.

What this means for the files you get

Rather than asking which software a studio uses, ask what they will hand over.

• An STL for printing and casting — every package produces one.
• A STEP file if you want the model editable by a third party later. This effectively requires a NURBS-based workflow.
• Renders for client approval, which any of them can produce to a good standard.
• Confirmation that the model is a closed, watertight solid at the scale you expect.

A studio that cannot supply STEP is telling you something about how portable your file will be.

The tool matters less than what leaves with you

Good work comes out of all of these packages and bad work comes out of all of them too. What actually affects you is whether the file is print-ready, whether it stays editable, and whether you own something you can take elsewhere.

We work in Rhino with jewellery tooling on top, and supply STL and STEP together so the model stays usable beyond us. Quotations are free, so send a design and see what comes back.