Getting started

This page is a tour of the whole screen: the menu bar, the cutting instructions on the left, the render in the middle, the settings on the right, and every mouse gesture and keyboard shortcut the studio has. The screenshots below show the stone the studio opens with.

The screen has four main areas, always on screen, plus a fifth that only appears while you are editing a facet:

• the top bar, with the menu bar and a readout of which mode you are in;
• the cutting instructions pane, on the left;
• the render, in the middle, with the view sliders and the stone's proportions laid over it;
• the render settings panel, on the right;
• a thin sub bar above the render, which only appears while you are editing a facet (see "Editing a facet" below).

Everything here runs from a single page in your browser, and nothing is sent to a server (see "Saving, undo and sharing" below). If you would rather keep a copy that opens without needing an internet connection, see Saving the studio to your computer.

The top bar

The studio's name sits top left. Beside it is the menu bar: File, Edit, Tools and Help. Click a menu to open it; click its button again, press Escape, or click anywhere else to close it. While one menu is open, moving the pointer onto another menu's button opens that one straight away.

At the top right, Overview always tells you which mode the page is in — it changes to say so whenever you open a mode such as editing a tier, scaling height, resizing the girdle, the cutting assistant or tilt performance.

The File menu

The Edit menu

The Tools menu

The Help menu

Documentation opens this site in a new tab; bug report 💀 opens the project's issue tracker in a new tab.

The cutting instructions pane

On the left, the cutting instructions read like a sheet you would take to the machine: a title, an author and a date, then every tier of the pavilion and the crown in the order they are cut.

The cut header

The name, author and date are each a text box you click to edit: click one, type, then press Enter or click away to apply it, or Escape to cancel. The name is also what File > Rename and F2 open.

Pavilion and crown

Below the header are two foldable sections, Pavilion then Crown — click a section's title to fold or unfold it. Each row is one tier: its letter and number (such as P1 or C3), its angle, the teeth it is cut at, and, in italics, any cutting note for it. A tier kept only for its meetpoints shows its teeth in curly braces.

Click a row to select its tier — the same tier highlights on the stone. Double-click a row (anywhere but its cutting note) to open that tier for editing; see "Editing a facet" below. With a row focused, Space selects it the same way a click does; Enter does too if it is not already the selected row, but on the row that already is, Enter instead opens it for editing, the same as Enter anywhere else on the page while that tier is selected. Alt+↑ / Alt+↓ moves the focused row up or down within its own section. You can also press and drag a row to reorder it; a line shows where it will land, and a pavilion row can never be dropped among the crown's, or the other way round.

The plain ↑/↓ keys (no Alt, and from anywhere on the page, not only a focused row) move the selection itself instead: ↓ selects the next tier and ↑ the previous one, running down the pavilion and into the crown and stopping at either end, rather than wrapping round. With nothing selected, ↓ picks the first tier and ↑ the last.

Once a row is selected, click its cutting note to type one; the note stays with that tier even if it is later reordered.

The tier toolbar

Pinned under the tier tables, these buttons act on whichever tier is selected (except Comments, which needs no selection). Selecting a tier brings most of them alive, as it does here. In a narrow pane the seven buttons wrap onto two rows, New/Delete/Edit/Hide over Preform/Frosted/Comments; drag the pane wider and, past about 540px, they settle into one row in the same order.

Resizing the pane

The seam on the pane's right edge is also its handle: drag it to make the pane wider or narrower (it has a minimum and a maximum width), or focus it with Tab and use ←/→ to move it a step at a time, or Home/End to snap it to its narrowest or widest. The render settings panel's own left edge works the same way. Your chosen widths are remembered.

The render

The middle of the screen is the stone itself, with a ring of ticks around it (the index gear's teeth) that fades in when the stone is close to face-up or face-down.

The view sliders

Over the bottom left of the render, two sliders turn the stone directly: X rotation (spin) turns it about its own axis, and Y rotation (tilt) tilts that axis towards or away from you. Under them, Top and Side jump straight to face-up or side-on, and also undo any sideways tilt (see below). The sliders follow whatever orbiting or double-clicking a facet has already done, and their numbers are also click-to-edit text boxes.

Dragging sideways on the stone tilts it to your left or right: its axis tips the way you drag. Dragging up or down moves Y rotation (tilt). There is no slider for the sideways tilt; Top or Side sets it straight again. The ring of index ticks fades out once the stone is tipped more than a few degrees, just as it does when you tilt it with Y rotation (tilt).

To spin the stone about its own axis instead, hold Shift while you drag sideways, or move the X rotation (spin) slider. Spinning keeps a face-up stone face-up, so the ring of index ticks stays in view and turns with it. Holding Ctrl makes no difference to a drag.

The stats box

Over the bottom right of the render, this shows the stone's facet count and three proportions, each a ratio to the girdle's width across its short axis: T/W (the table's width), C/W (the crown's height) and P/W (the pavilion's height). A ratio the stone does not have, such as a table on a pointed stone, shows a dash.

Editing a facet

Double-click a tier's row in the cutting instructions, double-click one of its facets on the stone, or select it and click Edit in the tier toolbar, to open it for editing. The top bar's mode readout then reads Editing followed by the tier's id.

A thin sub bar appears above the render, holding the index gear button and a scrolling ruler of its teeth, with Symmetry and Offset fields (or, in arbitrary mode, a box of teeth typed by hand). Drag the ruler, or scroll over it, to move the facet round the stone; the index changes as it passes each tooth.

In place of the render settings, the right-hand panel becomes two vertical scales, Angle and Depth: drag either (or scroll over it, or use the arrow keys once it has focus) to cut the facet there and then, with the stone updating as you go. Click the angle reading to type an exact value. A cutting plane is drawn over the stone showing exactly where the facet being edited sits.

Cancel stops editing and undoes every change made since it began; Escape does the same. Done stops editing and keeps the changes.

Clicking the gear button opens the index gear dialog: the number of teeth on the index wheel, a Fractional teeth checkbox, and an Arbitrary mode checkbox that switches the sub bar to typed indexes. Enter applies (when the fields are valid); Escape or Cancel closes it unchanged.

See Editing facets by tier for the full detail of editing, adding, deleting, hiding and reordering tiers.

The render settings panel

On the right, foldable sections choose how the stone is rendered: Material (a preset, refractive index, dispersion and stone color), Tracing (which renderer, and its quality settings) and Lighting (the lighting model and its colors). Click a section's title to fold or unfold it — here is Tracing unfolded, as an example:

Click a color swatch, such as Stone color, to open a picker: hue, saturation, value and opacity sliders, and a Pick from screen button that samples a color from anywhere on your screen.

See Deterministic renderer and Monte Carlo renderer for what the two renderers under Tracing do.

Fullscreen

At the top of the panel, Fullscreen hides the top bar and the cutting instructions pane, leaving only the stone and this settings panel. Click it again — labelled Exit fullscreen — or press Escape, to bring them back.

Settings, theme and precision

Choose File > Settings for the studio's own preferences: a light/dark toggle, and how many decimal places an angle is shown to in the cutting instructions and the angle scale. Both are remembered.

Clicking the toggle switches the whole page — this documentation included — between dark and light colors.

Saving, undo and sharing

Every change you can undo is also saved into the page's own address as you make it — there is no separate save button, and nothing is sent to a server. Copy the address bar to send someone your design; opening it restores it exactly. See Sharing designs by link.

File > Export writes the design out as a file instead — GemCad's .gem or .asc, Gem Cut Studio's .gcs, Wavefront .obj, .stl, or a PDF cutting sheet. See Saving and exporting for opening and saving files.

Every mouse gesture and keyboard shortcut

Anywhere on the page

On the stone

Cutting instructions rows

Text you can click to edit (the cut name, author, date, a tier's note, a slider's number)

Sliders

The index ruler and the angle/depth scales (while editing a facet)

Dialogs

Resizing the side panes