Talk:Akhavan - Lumina's Rays

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Note: This diagram is one of an 8-part suite of stones. <put link here once I'm done with the suite>

Damn, do I ever love stones with unusual girdle outlines! The point of this design was to have something involving the sun shining through an object, so I thought of the sun rising over an Inca/Mayan/Aztec temple ruin, with arches at the top. And does this design ever deliver! Even the reflection/extinction pattern suggests that. I basically took a round and chopped it across to get the outline, then did random trial and error to get the crown.

The design is surprisingly brilliant, considering that you'd expect half the light return to disappear through the "chopped" end of the round. There's plenty of scintillation too, from the high number of facets. I really like this in sunrise-y colors, so light pinks and yellows, and when I rendered it in straw-yellow rutile it looked AMAZINGLY like a sunrise. I think I might just cut this in a giant chunk of rutile, but it CAN be cut in any material from feldspar to rutile (RI = 1.52 - 2.62) with no changes. In the lower RIs, as you tilt from the -Y to the +Y direction, you get some interesting movement of windows, which lends a really cool "sunrise" effect. (I know some people don't like windows...so if you're too traditional for that kind of stuff, scale the pavilion up to 1.06 times its normal depth.)

And now, the bad news. This pattern is a bitch and a half to cut. The pavilion starts off like a round, but here, if you screw up even a bit, the crown turns out terribly. Getting the "chopped" portion of the outline correct is also a bit hard. However, the really hard part is the crown. C4 is cut to meet (C1, C3), but as soon as you finish C4, you overwrite that meet with C5, and create new meets with C6. Messing up here WILL cause serious problems down the line. And then, as if that wasn't bad enough, there are floating facets. If you don't cut C7 to exactly 50% of C4, then C9 and C10 will need their angles adjusted to meet properly. Have fun; good luck.


Difficulty level = mid expert