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Description
While developing a corporate site for a new business, I had wanted to revisit rendering tricky things like gems. Pictured here is the end result of about 30 hours of modeling, a million test-renders, and lots of minute adjustments! While I am certainly not an expert 3D modeler, I do believe these are all made physically correct (or as close to as I knew how) as to how real gems would look / behave with light. Gems:

Diamonds, Zircons, Sapphires, Emeralds, Rubies, Citrines, Yellow Citrines, Amethysts, and Peridots.

Scene rendered out at 2560x1920 in 3ds Max 2008. Stats:

71 gems based off of Zap's tutorials.
10 photometric lights all casting ray traced shadows.
Environment Map + Skylight + Mental Ray / Final Gather + Caustics all enabled. Environment exposure was set at 2.0 as it had been too bright at 1.
Ground based off of an Arch Material stone with reflective, diffuse, and bump maps applied.
In the case of this first render, each light used 20,000 photons for final gather and all other energy was automatically calculated by FG for each light's properties (photometric spot + disc shape + spotlight).
To increase the flare / ping / fire slightly, Final Gather was increased to 2.0 and Caustics were increased to 3.0, and light discs' radaii were upped to 13'6".
Material was based off of A&D Glass Solid Physical with different and proper IOR values for each gem were set.
AA processing was bumped up to "High" (min 1 / max 16) for cleaner lines and Final Gather precision was set to "High"
Reflections and Refractions for the final render were increased to 8 and 12 respectively, along with 3 FG bounces.

Total rendering time was 3 hours, 10 minutes on a dual Xeon Westmere 8-core workstation at 3.6 Ghz. RAM used surprisingly, was only about 2GB.

As of 1-15-13, rendering time was 2 hours, 6 minutes on a dusl Xeon Westmere 12-core (24 thread) workstation at 3.6 Ghz.

Personally, I think it'll suffice. I wish some of the gems were brighter but that's just me being picky.

Description
While developing a corporate site for a new business, I had wanted to revisit rendering tricky things like gems. Pictured here is the end result of about 30 hours of modeling, a million test-renders, and lots of minute adjustments! While I am certainly not an expert 3D modeler, I do believe these are all made physically correct (or as close to as I knew how) as to how real gems would look / behave with light. Gems:

Diamonds, Zircons, Sapphires, Emeralds, Rubies, Citrines, Yellow Citrines, Amethysts, and Peridots.

Scene rendered out at 2560x1920 in 3ds Max 2008. Stats:

71 gems based off of Zap's tutorials.
10 photometric lights all casting ray traced shadows.
Environment Map + Skylight + Mental Ray / Final Gather + Caustics all enabled. Environment exposure was set at 2.0 as it had been too bright at 1.
Ground based off of an Arch Material stone with reflective, diffuse, and bump maps applied.
In the case of this first render, each light used 20,000 photons for final gather and all other energy was automatically calculated by FG for each light's properties (photometric spot + disc shape + spotlight).
To increase the flare / ping / fire slightly, Final Gather was increased to 2.0 and Caustics were increased to 3.0, and light discs' radaii were upped to 13'6".
Material was based off of A&D Glass Solid Physical with different and proper IOR values for each gem were set.
AA processing was bumped up to "High" (min 1 / max 16) for cleaner lines and Final Gather precision was set to "High"
Reflections and Refractions for the final render were increased to 8 and 12 respectively, along with 3 FG bounces.

Total rendering time was 3 hours, 10 minutes on a dual Xeon Westmere 8-core workstation at 3.6 Ghz. RAM used surprisingly, was only about 2GB.

As of 1-15-13, rendering time was 2 hours, 6 minutes on a dusl Xeon Westmere 12-core (24 thread) workstation at 3.6 Ghz.

Personally, I think it'll suffice. I wish some of the gems were brighter but that's just me being picky.