How can I make a pear-cut gem?

Hi
Could anyone tell me how I can make pear shape prim which I can then facet to make a gem stone?
A teardrop shape sculptie isn't really suitable for what I want to make

Can't be done with a single build-prim.
Could be reasonably done with a few spheres.
An exact single prim in any shape can be done with a sculpt.

And faceting? You definitely cannot "facet" prims. Fake with a texture maybe.

Check with Aminom Marvin, sculpter extraordinaire.

What is wrong with the teardrop shaped sculptie ? You could easily facet the mesh ... it will be exact as long as you can live with multiple of 2 facets in u and v ....



the image shows a simple facetted teardrop... It Could be done with more facettes of course... If you want a pear shaped object, thats just a matter of shifting the vertex planes up or down a bit until it fits right ...

Or do i missunderstand, what you are aiming for ?

For a single prim solution, sculpties are the only option. Tear drop cuts ideally have 58 facets so it's well within what you can achieve with sculpties. You would most likely have to use a triangulated sculptie (it's on my todo list to add these to Primstar). In the meantime you can still create them, it just needs a little more manual work than quad based sculpties.

In Blender you'd do it by adding a 8 x 8 or 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 grid (depending on the LOD level you want to model at - probably 16 x 16 for this shape), from the top view unwrap with project from view (bounds) to create the UV layout. Then press CTRL-t to triangulate the mesh.

You can use the warp tool to turn the plane into a cylinder (Gaia has a video on doing this) and then join the edges using merge vertices. You'd then make the teardrop shape and facets by arranging groups of triangles appropriately and bake the sculptie as normal.

outch... i should have translated the question to my mother tongue before answering earlier today. "58 facets" gave me the hit i needed to understand what you mean... Can you forgive me please my rubish above?

The actual shape that is referred to as a "Pear cut" for gems would take an insane number of prims to build with real facets. You'd probably have at least half a dozen more prims than the cut has facets, since the front and back are not symmetrical, and since there are some faces on a Pear Cut that are not triangles.

I made something that roughly aproximates the shape of a pear cut gem with two prims - a sphere, dimpled on one side, and a cone, with both flattened and streached a bit. Not perfect, but it would pass at the distances most people would actually look at it. With a little fiddling I was able to adjust the texture repeats so I could probably have placed a high-quality texture on that surface giving the appearance of the proper facets for a pear-cut gem. But it would be a LOT of work to get that texture mapped exactly right.

With a sculpted prim, if you did one actual facet on the sculpt for each facet on the gem, you're going to run into Level Of Detail problems as soon as you back away, aren't you? That highly-faceted look would be a real pain to make LOD resistant, unless I greatly misunderstand the process. But I'm no expert on sculpties.

In the long run, ask yourself why you want extreme accuracy for this. Are you going to model a famous gem, and make it big enough that people can apperciate the faceting?

Or are you thinking of making this part of a piece of jewelry to be worn? If that is the case, you could probably use far less detail and accuracy, and 99% of the people who see it, at normal viewing distances, will never notice the difference.

I have purchased this shape you want in a sculpty map, nano prim. Look it up on XStreet. I cant think of the name but its there and you get plenty of extras shapes along with. Good Luck, sculpty nano priim jewelry is a blast!