Ok gang I'm going to start with a couple of disclosures:
1. I have never used or even looked at Gemcad, Dinah has and found it a bit cumbersome.
2. When I was at school we didn't even have calculators, slide rules and Log tables were the go, so though I can operate a computer my skills are not the best, but better than some.
As I said earlier I have seen a demo video of Gemcut and it captivated me, today took it to the next level and there was one significant element that made it stand out which I believe it totally different from Gemcad; rendering to a Gemray style viewer is 'real time' in a box below your faceting screen and this view is highly editable with colours and other attributes, to show areas of interest like headshadow, light rays and many others.
We had the opportunity to download the 30 day trial and have a play during the workshop, Dinah and I had a few illuminated discussions prior to the full workshop as others in the group were downloading and setting up the software, me on the mouse and her watching me blundering around :argh: (she's an ex-programmer) but this still confirmed the power of this software and how easy it is to use.
The exercise was a Std round brilliant which I could now draw, render and print to a PDF in less than a couple of minutes even with my computer skills!
ower: :Y:
The intuitive simplicity of this program is amazing and the speed at which you can produce a fully editable result once you understand the very simple controls is truly remarkable. It will import .gem files so these also become fully editable and saves them to its own file structure with all additional Gemcut info, you can also export back to a .gem file but I am not sure why you would want to.
There is so much to absorb that it'll take us a fair bit of reading and playing, so for others probably the best first step is download the 30 day trial complete with its 60 page instruction book, then play. Sure things will go wrong as you initially blunder around, but very soon you'll get the hang of it and be amazed once you get started and explore its full capabilities. Rej is also building a series of online tutorial videos, the first of which canbe accessed vie the 'Help' button on the screen.
Another little item I loved is in the 'Preferences', you can tell the software that you only want 1/10th of a degree and not be bogged down with correcting 1/100th :clap:
The software was released officially 2 days ago and Rej had been pushed by the Guild to have the release in time for the AFG's Annual shindig, it's been 2 yrs in the making so this is only the beginning, there is still plenty of development to be done expanding its capabilities and Rej has kept the price low so he can get
constructive input for additional features, v1.01 is already in progress.
I think one of the big pluses is Rej's background, he not only cuts gems but also has a software development background from the gaming industry so knows how to make things respond fast visually using simplicity with controls.
We now have Gemcut and will be completing the purchase next week so we can load it onto Dinah's computer as well at no extra cost, this does not apply to commercial use. We only had about 1/2hr for the workshop so we have a lot more to explore so today we barely scratched the surface of what the v.1.00 is capable of and having had a glimpse of v.1.01 I know there are some interesting additions on there way once they have been beta tested.
We both see this as a significant move forward as the software is designed for today's computers and that is not to take any credit away from Gemcad which was designed back in the 90's, its new, bang smack up to date and fun to use.
I'm sorry if this sounds like a sales pitch, it's not intended to be, but this software is just so much fun to use.