We have enough material to create a simple diamond ring. We’ll use the gem from the Another Quick Gem tutorial and set several instances of it in a ring.
The ring itself will be modeled using subdivision tools and smoothed.
When completed, we will have a ring smilar to this one:
The Scene
Let us create a new scene using the Dark Studio template.
A few changes:
- Set all the directional lights to Construction
- Replace the lightdome and reflected environment for the Lightdome – Physics Lab environment.
- Remove the Backdrop
The Ring, Frodo
The ring begins as a simple lathe of a rectangle.
A lathed rectangle
Convert the lathe to Linear Segments
Convert to Bézier surface and reduce the complexity of the object to a minimum
This simplified object is ready to be converted into a Polygon Mesh
Using the magic wand, select the top and bottom faces of the ring
Using the Extrude Normal tool, extrude the top and bottom
Now select the top and bottom bands. To do this, select one edge on the top band, one on the bottom band and do a ring selection (N). Then revert to Face mode
Normal Extrude the selection
...and again
After subdividing, we should have a ring like this one.
The Gems
We already have our gems ready. We just need to import them (load the shape if we are orderly, cut & paste if not).
The problem is: how to completely fill the ring with diamonds with no overlapping?
This post provides the Replication Helper Utility, a small utility that calculates the repetitions and angle for replicating an object. In this case, the ring has a radius of 0.5 inches and the gems have been scaled down to 0.2 inches.
The Replication Helper Utility provides 14 repetitions with a rotation angle of 24º as the answer.
The completed ring
Textures
We need two textures at least: the metal for the ring and the gem texture.
The Metal Texture
The metal texture will be a Silver texture, similar to the one from the Basic metallic textures tutorial. Here is the screenshot of the texture used.
The Gem Texture
The gem texture is analog to the ones seen in the Gems 101 tutorial. The screenshot of the Zirconia texture created is below.
Camera, lighting and render
In this example we use a single camera from an isometric view, a single spotlight, and either Photons or Raydiosity rendering.
The image below is a Raydiosity render with Photons enabled.
This is it. Hope it is of use and that you can create good rings. Please share what you obtain! 🙂
