RhinoGold in 2026: Still Installed, No Longer Supported

If RhinoGold is still on your machine, you are not alone. Thousands of jewelers still open it every week. The software runs. The files open. The muscle memory is intact.

What changed is everything around it.

RhinoGold is no longer a current product. Gemvision (now part of Stuller) does not sell it, does not update it, and no longer offers technical support. You can keep using an existing install. You should not plan a studio around it.

This article is for people who type “RhinoGold” into Google in 2026 and need a straight answer: what it is now, what still works, and what to do with the library you already have.

What RhinoGold was

RhinoGold was the jewelry plugin that put professional gem setting, shanks, and pavé on top of Rhinoceros. For a decade it was the default CAD for a lot of workshops. If you learned jewelry CAD in the 2000s or 2010s, there is a good chance you learned it here.

The company behind it was acquired by the Stuller Group in 2014. The founder, Rafa, stayed through 2016 and later started 2Shapes, the team behind RhinoArtisan. Gemvision’s current product is MatrixGold. Those two facts explain almost every “RhinoGold vs …” search you see today.

Can you still use RhinoGold?

Yes, if it is already installed and licensed.

No, if you need:

• support when something breaks
• a path onto current Rhino (especially Rhino 8)
• new tools, renderers, or manufacturing features
• a product you can hire into, train on, or buy again

“Still usable” and “still a platform” are different things. An unsupported plugin on an old Rhino is a clock. The day you change a workstation, a Windows version, or a Rhino license, the clock stops.

That is why “RhinoGold for Rhino 8” is such a common search. People are not looking for a feature list. They are looking for a way to keep working.

What to do with your files

The good news is the library. RhinoGold designs are Rhino files (.3dm). They are not a locked format. They open in current Rhino.

The part that does not travel cleanly is the gems and the jewelry data hanging off them. A stone that was a RhinoGold gem is not automatically a live, editable gem in another plugin. You need a conversion step, or you rebuild.

If you move to RhinoArtisan, that step is built in: open the file, convert the gems (Recover / Standardize), and the stones become RhinoArtisan gems you can size, price, and report.

Do not wait until the old install dies to test this. Pick ten real production files this week and open them on a current machine.

What replaced RhinoGold

Search results will often present MatrixGold as the automatic successor. MatrixGold is Gemvision’s current product and one of the options former RhinoGold users may encounter when looking for a replacement. It follows a different product and workflow direction from the original RhinoGold.

RhinoArtisan was created by the original RhinoGold founder and continues the idea of professional jewelry tools built directly on Rhino. It works with current Rhino versions, keeps the .3dm workflow, and provides a migration path for existing RhinoGold designs — while adding modern jewelry design, manufacturing, rendering and AI workflows, with RhinoArtisan 7.0 launching in September 2026.

Price, training, and how your shop actually designs should decide. A comparison of the two living products is a separate post. The point here is simpler: “RhinoGold” is no longer a purchase. It is a migration.

What “RhinoGold software” should mean in a search

A lot of pages still talk about RhinoGold as if you can buy it, as if $2,495 still means something, as if the roadmap is paused rather than over. Treat those as stale.

If you are evaluating jewelry CAD in 2026, compare the products that are shipping. Using last decade’s name as the category is how studios get stuck.

A practical next step

1. Inventory the RhinoGold version and the Rhino version it sits on.
2. Export or copy the .3dm library to a current machine.
3. Open a dozen files. Note which gems, settings, and materials survive.
4. Trial the tool you are actually going to work in. For RhinoArtisan, start with the RhinoGold page and a 15-day trial: open one of your own designs on day one.

You do not have to throw the old install away tomorrow. You do have to stop pretending it is the plan.

If you are still using RhinoGold, the real question in 2026 is not whether RhinoGold still works. It is where you want to take that workflow next.

RhinoArtisan was built precisely for that transition: stay in Rhino, keep working with your .3dm files, recover your existing jewelry library, and move onto a platform that is actively being developed for the next generation of jewelry CAD.