I'd like a small desktop machine to produce jewellery items, rings, earrings, the odd torc and small sculpture - probably 20-30 cubic centimetres is the largest size I'd want to work in and half that size would probably be find - though a bit small for torcs. I need pretty good detail on a subtrate that casts well for the production of silver or gold jewellery. I've been having a look at software and systems on the market now and it looks as if things have got a lot cheaper and better over the past few years. It is difficult to decide what is a good system to get with such a variety. So any advice would be really useful. I'm looking for CAD software that can produce standard CNC output, get input from a 3d -scanner and is easy to manipulate visually. I'm not sure if there is good linux, Apple Mac or other s/w about, but I'm not really looking for a mega-expensive application used to design high performance motor car engines! I like the look of the Roland machine [URL]http://www.torcomp.com/products/product_detail.cfm?productid=9275[/URL] which is a good price too at <US00. I mention this just to give the idea - if there is something with better detail, faster, bigger, cheaper and so forth on the market, then I'd love to hear about it! The 3d printers apparently produce quite arough finish that would be no good for jewellery and they're expensive. I'm happy to be persuaded that I'm wrong here too! To me the ultimate would be to have a system that enabled you to do jewellery and sculpture design with a VR headset (Virtual Reality) and a data glove - anything with a user interface approaching this level of simplicity would be good (does the Mac do something like this??). I'd really like to use this as a tool to design jewellery and make sculpture - I'm not wanting to become an expert on some complex software application. I'd be keener on something intuitive like Kodak photo enhancement software rather than something like photoshop or the gimp - though it would be nice to have access to those features the main thing would be to be able to see and rotate the object as you design it and to make changes easily and intuitively. I know that there are some companies that you can send CAD file to and they'll produce the object for you - I'm not really keen on the time it will take and I'm not sure it would work that well to South Africa anyway. Maybe there is such a company in Cape Town, which would be great, but, otherwise, I'd rather produce my own stuff at home fairly quickly even if the quality is a bit lower than send out for it to be made somewhere else. Any ideas of what I should be going for?