Artisan Grasshopper
Overview
Artisan for Grasshopper puts the RhinoArtisan jewelry engine on the Grasshopper canvas. The same rings, settings and stones you build with the RhinoArtisan commands become components you can wire together, drive from sliders, and rebuild automatically when a value changes.
What it is
A Grasshopper plug-in with more than 240 components spread across six ribbon tabs. Between them they cover a complete piece: the shank, the stones, the settings that hold them, the accessories, and the export formats you hand to a renderer, a customer or a caster.
Nothing here is a re-implementation. The components call the same geometry kernel as RhinoArtisan itself, so a Classic ring built on the canvas is the same Classic ring built from the toolbar — only now its diameter, profile and stone size are inputs you can vary.
The six tabs
| Tab | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Artisan | Assets, exporters, manufacturing sprues, value lists and the utilities that hold a definition together. |
| Gems | Individual stones, created by carat, by millimetre size or by shape. |
| Gemset | The settings that place and hold stones — bezels, baskets, halos, prongs, channels and rails. |
| Shanks | Ring bodies: classic, cathedral, eternity, signet, bypass, wedding and the rest. |
| Accessories | Bails, beads, charms, milgrain and rope details. |
| Readers | Components that unpack a result back into its individual values. |
The tabs are ordered deliberately — Artisan, Gems, Gemset, Shanks, Accessories, Readers — and the plug-in moves them to sit together at the end of the Grasshopper ribbon, after the native tabs.
What it is good for
- Collections instead of one-offs. Define a ring once, then drive finger size, stone carat and profile from inputs and generate the whole size run or the whole stone range.
- Configurator data. Every builder emits a taxonomy dictionary and a semantic description alongside its geometry — the data a product configurator, a SKU and a spec sheet feed on. Generate that data and the models on your own seats; a configurator that runs Artisan live for your customers is an OEM case.
- Production files, automatically. The exporters write 3DM, STL and GLB — as files or as base64 strings — plus technical charts, so a definition can end in the deliverables rather than in a model you still have to export by hand.
- Manufacturing prep. Sprue components build the casting tree, and every builder accepts a computation mode so the same definition can produce render geometry or manufacturing geometry.
What your license covers
Artisan for Grasshopper is licensed like the Scripting API and MCP: it is one of RhinoArtisan’s automation interfaces, and what decides the license is who runs the definition, and for whom — not the operating system, and not whether the software lets it run.
| Use | License |
|---|---|
| Definitions your team runs and supervises in Rhino, on its own seats: collections, size runs, exports, configurator data | Included in your RhinoArtisan 7 license |
| Definitions solved with nobody at the seat — Rhino.Compute, Hops, Rhino.Inside, scheduled or queued jobs, any server — even for internal use | Automation license |
| Definitions your customers or any other third party drive — a web configurator, a hosted API, a Grasshopper hosting platform | OEM agreement |
Selling the jewelry, models, renders and files you make with it is never restricted. The full terms are in the EULA; for Automation and OEM, talk to us.
Where to go next
- Getting started — check the requirements and build your first ring.
- How a definition is built — the four kinds of component and how they chain together. Read this before the reference.
- Component reference — every component, with the exact ports it exposes.