Quote - Wow! Amazing detail and fantastic model!

Thank you very much!  It was an exercise in trial and error to be sure.  I must have modeled about 10 different versions of the heart alone, and tested each one in several render engines with physical diamond materials, just to see how (if at all) the topology affected the render results.

In the end, I decided that trying to model the stones wasn't as easy as I first thought, because the realistic appearance depended heavily on the topological detail when using unbiased rendering, and very close up camera angles.  In a "biased" engine, like Mental Ray, I was able to model the jewels very simply, and get the results I expected, because the render engine used a lot of material "fakes" to achieve a realistic result.  However, in more accurate engines, like Octane, or even Luxrender, each facet and face of the geometry played a surprisingly crucial role in the realism of the refraction, caustics and dispersion effects.  In other words, the more realistic and detailed the geometry, the more realistic the light played with the materials.  I think this was particularly true since there were no control maps used to define the surfaces, and help with realism.

Anyway, I hope I made the right choices in regard to topology, so that the model renders as expected in any render engine, provided the lighting and materials are reasonably accurate.  I know some people might think I could have gone "lighter" with the polycount or edge density, but I wanted to be sure that the important parts of the surfaces here didn't rely too heavily on smoothing groups or edge weights, which could get over-ridden in some applications or render engines.  Adding support loops and edge density is the only way to be sure that the object renders as intended, no matter where it's used.

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