How to Use Auto Pavé in Rhino

Auto Pavé is for the moment the surface is already right and you still have two hundred stones to place. It is not a way to skip the shank. If the dome is ugly, Auto Pavé will pave the ugliness evenly.

This walkthrough uses Auto Pavé in RhinoArtisan, on Rhino, on a simple domed band. About eleven minutes if you follow the video. Use it as the recipe whenever you want melee on a surface you already trust.

What you leave with: a shank, layout curves, a dome those curves become, a pavé Auto Pavé actually owns, cutters and prongs, and a last look that decides if the tool helped or just filled the viewport.

Surface first. Auto Pavé second.

Build the shank

Finger size and a profile thick enough to take a dome and a cutter pass. Auto Pavé does not invent metal. If the band is a wire, the stones will hang off it.

Get the inside comfortable. Leave the outside ready to carry a surface, not a finished pavé you already sketched by hand.

Draw the layout curves

The curves are the contract. They mark where the dome starts and stops, and they keep melee off the edges. If a curve pinches, Auto Pavé will crowd. If it flares, you will see daylight.

Edit them until one imaginary stone sits honestly at the crown and at the rim. That is cheaper than deleting a hundred gems later.

Make the domed surface

Fill those curves. Thickness under the face matters. Auto Pavé plus cutters will eat metal. A pretty shell will break through at the center.

The surface should be the ring you would cast even without stones. If you would not print it bare, do not pave it.

Run Auto Pavé

Now the tool. In RhinoArtisan you point Auto Pavé at that surface, set stone size and the way rows follow the dome, and let it place the melee.

Read the result as a jeweler. Same size in a region. No gems over the lip. No collision at the join. If a row climbs the crown and drowns at the edge, the surface or the curves are wrong. Do not scale fifty stones by hand to hide a bad dome.

Auto Pavé is fast because the decisions were already in the surface. That is the point of the video.

Cutters and prongs

Cutters open seats. Prongs or beads hold the melee. This is the half Auto Pavé cannot fake.

Check wall thickness after the cutters, especially under the crown. If a cutter breaks through, add metal, do not plug the hole with another gem. Look from the side: beads above the girdle will catch; beads below will not hold.

Final check

Top, side, inside the finger. Auto Pavé that only looks good from above is a texture, not a ring.

Then stop. The last minute of the video is this pass: the band you would send, not one more row because the tool made it easy.

What to do next

Open the tutorial on YouTube and run Auto Pavé once on this dome. Then change stone size and keep the same curves. The second time is when the tool feels like a measurement, not a button.

If you want to run this on your own Rhino, start a 15-day trial or go to rhinoartisan.com.