Facetra for Indian Jewellery Ateliers

Facetra is the design workflow tool built for Indian jewellery ateliers — Jadau, Polki, Kundan, Meenakari, Temple, Rajwadi and modern Indian catalogue pieces. This page explains how a working atelier uses Facetra day-to-day, and where it fits alongside your CAD bench, karigars and client-approval workflow.

The problem Facetra solves for ateliers

The traditional sketch-to-CAD handoff is slow and expensive:

• Designer sketches a piece on paper (1–2 hrs)
• Hand-render for client review (3–4 hrs, or outsourced ₹2,000+)
• Client asks for revisions — repeat rendering
• Multi-view drawings for the CAD bench (2–3 hrs)
• Bill of Materials calculation (30 min–1 hr per piece)
• CAD operator models against the reference (1–2 days)

Result: 4–7 days from sketch to castable CAD file, ₹3,000–₹8,000 in outsourced rendering, and every client revision restarts the cycle.

How ateliers use Facetra

1. Client meeting → same-day render

Sketch during the meeting, snap a photo, upload to Facetra, and produce a photoreal render before the client leaves. Show 3–4 variations of the same piece in different stone colours (emerald / ruby / sapphire) using the lasso refinement — each variation costs 1 credit (~₹8) instead of 3 hours of hand-render time.

2. Client revisions → 5-minute turnaround

"Make the centre stone larger, add temple motifs on the shoulder, change the meena colour to green" — mark the regions with the lasso, describe the change, get a new render in 60 seconds. No more back-and-forth over WhatsApp with an outsourced renderer.

3. CAD bench handoff → drop-in ready

Export the CAD kit (multi-view sheet + bare-metal render + BOM + 3D mesh) and hand it to your CAD operator. They open the zip in Rhino / MatrixGold / JewelCAD, retopologize the mesh, and start modelling — no re-drawing, no back-and-forth clarification calls.

4. Karigar handoff → BOM + wall-thickness cheatsheet

The CAD kit's README ships with wall-thickness recommendations (DMLS 1–2mm, SLA 0.5mm, FDM 0.8–1.2mm, lost-wax 0.6–0.8mm) and a one-sided-shell workflow specifically for temple / animal / relief pieces. Your karigar sees exactly what to build.

5. Wholesale catalogue → PhotoRoom bulk render

Have hundreds of raw DSLR photographs of finished pieces? PhotoRoom converts them to studio-quality HD (4K) or 8K renders in bulk, on a solid matte-black backdrop, ready for your e-commerce site, catalogue PDF, or Instagram feed.

What Facetra saves you

Per-piece savings (typical Kundan Bali):

• Design time: 6 hours → 30 minutes (a designer can service 6× more clients per week)
• Rendering cost: ₹2,000–₹5,000 outsourced → ~₹256 in Facetra credits
• Time to castable CAD: 4–7 days → same day
• Client approval cycle: 3–5 revisions × 1 day each → 3–5 revisions × 5 minutes

What Facetra does NOT do

• Cast or manufacture jewellery — you still need your karigars and CAD bench.
• Replace Rhino / MatrixGold / JewelCAD — Facetra is a workflow layer before CAD.
• Retopologize meshes for direct casting — your CAD operator does that final step.

Which plan do most ateliers pick?

Small ateliers (2–5 designers) usually start on the Studio pack (₹3,999 for 500 credits) — enough for ~150 finished CAD kits. Medium ateliers (5–15 designers) move to the Team pack (₹7,499 for 1,000 credits). Larger houses with dedicated catalogue photography use the Enterprise annual plan which includes PhotoRoom bulk credits and dedicated support — contact hello@facetra.studio.

Frequently asked questions from ateliers

Do we need to change our CAD operator's tools?

No. Facetra outputs standard formats (PNG, CSV, GLB, STL, OBJ, FBX) that open in every professional jewellery CAD tool — Rhino, MatrixGold, JewelCAD, Firestorm.

How do we handle client confidentiality?

Every design is stored in a private per-atelier bucket. Nothing is public. Nothing is shared with other Facetra users. Nothing is used to train shared AI models. See our privacy policy.

Can we invite multiple designers to one account?

Yes — the Team and Enterprise plans include multi-seat access with per-designer usage tracking.

How does the live gold rate work?

Facetra fetches the current 22kt yellow gold rate every hour from a live commodity feed and applies it automatically to every BOM. Client quotes are never stale.

Do we need to teach our designers new software?

Facetra runs entirely in the browser and works exactly like uploading a photo. Most designers are productive within 15 minutes. The vocabulary (Jadau, Polki, chaton, bezel, jaali, meena work) is what they already speak.