Rough Planner: Best-Yield Overview

Rough Planner is a tool that helps you find the best way to cut a gem rough into your designed stone shape, maximizing the recovered weight (yield).

When you need it

You have:

• A piece of rough gemstone with known dimensions.
• A designed cut (a .facet file).
• A question: "How should I orient this rough to cut the most carats?"

Rough Planner answers that by testing many orientations, calculating how much of the rough gets used, and showing you the best few options.

What it does

1. You input your rough dimensions (length, width, height) and the rough material type.
2. You load your design (the .facet file).
3. Rough Planner searches for the best fit — either automatically, with guided nudges, or by you entering angles manually.
4. It shows yield percentage (what % of the rough becomes the finished stone) and physical weight estimates.
5. You pick the orientation you like and export it as cutting diagrams.

Rough vs. finished stone

The rough is the uncut stone as it comes from the mine or supplier — irregular, with color zoning, fractures, or inclusions.

The finished stone is the polished result after cutting — it's shaped exactly by your design and oriented to show the best color and light.

Rough Planner sits in the middle: it finds the best orientation of your designed shape within the rough, balancing:

• Yield (how much of the rough becomes finished stone).
• Orientation (which direction the cut sits in the rough).
• Color (if the rough has color zoning, you want the best color in the table).

The three search modes

• Auto: Rough Planner searches automatically through many orientations and ranks them by yield.
• Tilt-search: You set a rough orientation (the stone's angle in the lapidary setup), and Rough Planner nudges it slightly to find the best tilt within that orientation.
• Manual: You enter the orientation angles yourself, and Rough Planner calculates the yield for that specific angle.

Most cutters start with Auto to see what's possible, then use Tilt-search or Manual to fine-tune.

Yield and handoff

Once you've found a good fit:

• Rough Planner shows the estimated carat weight of the finished stone (based on your rough dimensions, material density, and yield %).
• You can export the best orientation as a set of cutting diagrams — the same PDF format as the regular Export → PDF from the Developer editor.
• You hand this to your lapidary setup and start cutting.

See the next section, Rough Dimensions, to get started.