Modeling Brilliant-Cut Diamonds

Cool....

If I say "Brilliant" will I get a caustic retort?

Only if you're opaque about it. :)

I simply love where this CGI venue is going.

Thanks for sharing

No.

Just a "cutting" remark....

No, but it shows that you are a multi-faceted individual! I don't want to get karat away here, but that comment was a real gem!

Impressive, sir.

Thanks. I'll post a link to the animation when it's finished.

You know, what's much harder to model convincingly are common, everyday things like milk jugs and wood and (omg!) grunge. Hardest of all are human faces. That's why these wonderful animated 'toons like Toy Story and Rango (some of the best animation I have ever seen, bar none) stay away from seriously attempting to model human beings (except in the case of Rango, in which Clint Eastwood makes more than just a cameo appearance). The slightest flaw in the model is instantly spotted because we humans are so geared to recognize the human form. Geometric perfection is trivial to model by comparison.

How true. Makes one feel humble when watching those "Cat Concerto" type of cartoons made painstakingly manually (Tom and Jerry were already cult figures and no less difficult to model).

Any way Europium...BRAVO !!! As usual i might add.

Excellent work! Any reason for selecting POV Ray over Blender or BrlCAD?

When I first started using POV-Ray, those other two didn't yet exist! I'm also using Blender, MORAY and Maya, which I'm learning. A friend is Maya master. So much so he was invited by Alias/Wavefront to give a presentation at SIGGRAPH. This was before Autodesk bought the rights. Some of his work:

Oh NOOO! You mean these photo's aren't real?

Seriously good work.

Vargas lives!

That last one is awesome!

Fantastic work e, that's totally brilliant.

I used to have a mate that was into cutting and polishing gem stones although he never used diamonds due to the cost and difficulty in working with something so hard.

His best piece in my opinion was a gem stone (I forget what type) that he cut and polished. If you held it at just the right angle you could see a butterfly suspended in the middle of the stone. It was totally mind blowing and far more beautiful than any diamond I had ever seen.

He used to make the most fantastic jewels out of largerstone which people offered him ridiculous amounts of money for. By the way largerstone is broken beer bottle glass.

One of the most amazing diamonds unearthed recently is a flawless Pink Argyle from the Argyle mine in Oz. *Uncut* it auctioned for AU$ 12 million. Oz is the only known source of pink diamonds. Btw, the oldest stones on Earth are zirconiums found in a basalt vein, also in Oz. I forget their age, but it's on the order of 3-4 billion years. Diamonds, which formed about 200 km below the Earth's surface, are found only in Kimberlite, an igneous rock which formed by very rapid ascension to the surface (~50 km/h). Consequently the rock cooled quickly enough that the diamonds embedded therein didn't have time to revert to graphite. All natural diamonds are at least one billion years old, reaching the surface during a period in Earth's history when there was considerable volcanism and that from deep under Earth's mantle. The carbon from which they're formed originated in the hearts of supernovae. That diamond on your missus' finger has a remarkable history, to be sure! (If she wants a bigger one, tell her there are plenty in Space: white dwarf stars consist mostly in diamond. :)