Birthstone of April- Diamond

Diamond Birthstone - April

To make the birthstone i had started off with a simple cone. By editing the polygons I deleted the flat bottom of the cone leaving a hollow shape. From there i had started to bring up the bottom of the cone using the polygon editor to start making the flat edges of the diamond. To cover the hole i simply capped it.

The box around the diamond is simpy a chamfered box. to make it hollow I had duplicated the box, moved the duplicated box up and scaled it down slightly. By using boolean I was able to make the chamfered cube into a box to hold my birthstone.

The cloth was made twice, the first cloth sits in the box this was created by;

1. Firstly creating a rectangle spline and editing it to a relevant size.
2. While still having the rectangle spline chosen I had clicked on garment maker in the modifier panel, this allows you to add faces to the rectangle, the more faces the more the cloth will be able to cover objects. But as always more faces means more memory size so an adequate amount of faces were chosen.
3. Then i clicked on cloth, from here i edited the rectangle to have similar properties of silk and also added the box in as the collision object. I then ran the scene and let the cloth fall into the box creating a base for my birthstone.
4. At this stage when i had placed the birthstone on the cloth it looked like it was floating on top, this meant i needed to create another cloth to act as if the diamond was dropped into the box and the silk has wrapped it self around the base of the diamond.
5. Another cloth was made in the same way but this time the diamond was the collision object.
6. Once the silk had fallen on to the diamond i had turned it upside down and placed it into the box and then placed the diamond into the groove that the silk cloth had made.
7. Finally a meshsmooth modifier was added to both cloths.
   

To make the box and diamond look like real glass i had to first change my renderer engine to mental ray. This allows for materials to look realistic. I then added the material "glass physics " to the diamond and box, i had made the refraction on the box quite low but the diamonds refraction were kept to a medium. The light shining off the diamond turning into a ray is an omni light with a glow and ray modifier attached.

There are three lights in my scene;

1. The light creating the glow and ray on my diamond.
2. An omni light to light the scene
3. A sky light to cast a natural light over the whole scene.

A simple 36mm camera was chosen and a 50 degree field of view was chosen to get a perfect amount of scene into the picture.