How a definition is built

There are more than 240 components, but only a handful of patterns. Once you can tell which family a component belongs to, its ports explain themselves — and the reference becomes a lookup rather than a reading list.

The four families

Almost every component is one of these:

Family	How to recognise it	What it does
Parameter	Named Something - … Parameters or … Params	Bundles a set of related settings into one value.
Builder	Named after the thing itself — Classic, Halo, Bezel, Bail	Takes parameter bundles and produces geometry.
Reader	In the Readers tab, named after its builder — Classic Reader, Halo Reader	Takes a design JSON and hands its builder the piece’s record.
Value list	A dropdown with no inputs	Offers the valid values for a text or numeric input.

The rest are supporting cast: assets, exporters, manufacturing sprues and utilities, all in the Artisan tab.

Parameters go in bundles

A ring has too many settings to be one row of inputs, so they are grouped. Classic does not take twenty numbers — it takes a Top Profile bundle, a Mid Profile bundle, an External Profile bundle, an Advanced bundle and a Gems bundle, each built by its own parameter component.

This matters for how they behave: a parameter component only passes on the inputs you actually connect. Set carat on Classic - Gems Parameters and leave the rest alone, and the bundle carries carat and nothing else — every other setting keeps the value the builder already has, from its defaults or from its JSON. A parameter component has no default values of its own and never forces one, so wiring it in changes nothing until you connect an input. Connect a Panel to its output to see exactly which keys it sends, as JSON.

The same applies to builders. Every input on Classic is optional; drop it on the canvas with nothing wired in and it still produces a ring.

The inputs of a builder

A builder’s inputs follow the same order everywhere:

1. What the piece is built on — the Gem, the Ring Diameter, a curve.
2. Its sections — Top Profile, Gems, Prongs, Upper Rail… — each fed by a parameter component.
3. Computation Mode, RENDER or MANUFACTURING. The same definition produces presentation geometry or production geometry depending on which you pass; the Computation Mode value list (Artisan › Value List) gives you the two valid strings.
4. Last, the three wires that come from the piece’s reader: JSON, Material and Part ID.

Builders produce more than geometry

A builder’s first outputs are the geometry — Breps for the metal, Gems and Meshes for the stones, kept separate so you can render, price or export them apart. The last four describe the piece:

• JSON. The complete record of what was built, with the same keys a design JSON uses. It is what a configurator stores to rebuild the piece later, and it can be fed back into the builder’s JSON input.
• Semantic. A plain-language description of the piece — the sentence a product page or a quote shows to a customer.
• Scheme. Every field the piece’s record takes and its type, without values. Wire it into Capsule Info.
• Parts. The pieces apart (prongs, rails, bridge, stones…), each with its own id and material, for Capsule Output and the exporters.

Magnets

To snap one part to another — a head onto a shank — use the Magnets component (Artisan › Utils). Wire in the geometry and the gem (or any plane): it gives the centre of each face of the bounding box measured in that orientation — Top, Bottom, North, South, West, East — and the Width, Depth and Height of the box. Several pieces wired together are measured as one.

A few builders also give points only they know, such as the top of the finger-size circle or the top of a cathedral’s bridge.

Readers hand each builder its record

Readers exist because the interesting inputs often arrive as data rather than as slider values — from a configurator, an order, or another part of the definition. Each builder has its reader — Basket Reader, Halo Reader, Cathedral Reader, Classic Reader… (Readers › Global). It takes the design JSON and gives three outputs that wire straight into the builder’s last three inputs:

• JSON — the piece’s record. The builder builds every section from it.
• Material — the metal of the piece (shank readers also give the Diameter).
• Part ID — where the piece goes in the design, such as gemset.main. When a design holds two pieces of the same kind, write which one in the reader’s ID input (side) and the Part ID becomes gemset.side.

The parameter components then go on top of the JSON: wire Classic - Gems Parameters with only a carat connected, and the ring takes everything from the JSON except the carat.

Design JSON
  → Classic Reader            (JSON · Material · Diameter · Part ID)
  → Classic                   (geometry · JSON · Semantic · Scheme · Parts)
      ↑ Classic - … Params    (only the values you want to change)
  → Capsule Output / Exporters (3DM · STL · GLB · technical chart · SKU)

Named assets, not redrawn profiles

Profile components in Artisan › Assets — Ring Profile by Name, Bezel Profile by Name, Halo Profile by Name and the others — fetch a profile from RhinoArtisan’s asset library by name instead of making you rebuild the curve. They read the library that the RhinoArtisan plug-in installs, so the profiles available on the canvas are the same ones available in RhinoArtisan itself.

Ring sizes are diameters

Every shank component takes a ring diameter in millimetres, never a local size. The nineteen ring size value lists (Shanks › Ring Sizes) do the conversion: pick USA, Europe, Japan or any of the others, choose a size in that system, and the list outputs the diameter to wire in. Swapping the list swaps the sizing system without touching anything downstream.

Where a definition ends

The Artisan › Exporters group turns a result into deliverables: 3DM, STL and GLB, each as a file on disk or as a base64 string when the output is going straight into another application. Alongside them sit the non-geometry exports — technical charts, the semantic description, the JSON record, SKU generation and comparison, and UI files.

For casting, Artisan › Manufacturing builds the sprue tree — single sprues, inner branches, and full inner and external trees.

Next

Component reference — every component in every tab, with its exact inputs, outputs, types and defaults.