Jewelry & Gemstones
Gemstone materials let light pass through a faceted stone: it bends as it enters, reflects inside the stone and splits into colours as it leaves — the brilliance and fire of a real diamond, sapphire or emerald. Stones render this way in the editor, in Preview, and in your published Share view and embeds. This guide builds a ring configurator from start to finish.
15 gemstone presets
Diamond, sapphire, ruby, emerald, amethyst, moissanite, aquamarine, tanzanite and more — each with its own refractive index, fire and body colour.
9 precious metals
Platinum, white and yellow gold, palladium, silver and black rhodium, polished and satin.
Ready jewelry models
A solitaire ring and four loose stones (round, oval, princess and emerald cut) in the 3D Model Library.
Jewelry lighting
A light-tent environment made for stones and polished metal, or your own HDR panorama.
Automatic quality
Each device renders the best quality it can keep smooth, from full fire on computers to a lighter version on phones.
A look for everywhere
Every gem material also keeps a transparent look for AR and other viewers that cannot refract light.
Build a Ring Configurator
- 1Get a model: Dashboard > Assets > 3D Models > Browse Library > Jewelry, and import "Solitaire Ring". It has three metal parts (Band, Prongs, Basket) and one stone (Stone). To use your own ring, read "Modelling stones" below first.
- 2Add your stones: Dashboard > Materials > Material Library > Gemstones. Pick a stone — Diamond, for example. The Material Editor opens with its Gemstone / Transmission section already set up; click Save. Repeat for every stone you want to offer.
- 3Add your metals: in the Material Library, open Metal and pick the jewellery metals you sell — Platinum 950, 18K White Gold (Rhodium), 22K Yellow Gold and so on — and save each one.
- 4Create a Configurator project and add the ring from your assets.
- 5In Options mode, add a Select Material block named "Metal". Target the ring and its parts Band, Prongs and Basket, then add your metals as options.
- 6Add a second Select Material block named "Stone". Target the part Stone and add your gem materials as options.
- 7Open Project Settings > Lighting > Environment & Reflections and choose Jewelry studio. Turn Environment Rotation to move the highlights until the stone and the metal look their best.
- 8Leave Gems & Glass Rendering Quality on Automatic.
- 9Open Preview to check the result, then publish from Share.
Gemstone Settings
Open a material in Dashboard > Materials and go to the Advanced tab. Set Transparency Mode to Transparent and the Gemstone / Transmission section appears below it (it is always shown for a material that already lets light through). Its live preview shows the material on a round brilliant stone in the Jewelry lighting environment.
| Setting | What it does | Range |
|---|---|---|
| On / Off | Lets light pass through the material. Switching it on also makes the transparent look see-through (opacity 40), so no viewer ever shows a solid stone. | — |
| Gem Preset | Sets the stone and its transparent look together. Every value stays editable; changing one makes the preset Custom. | 15 stones |
| Rendering | Gemstone: a faceted stone, traced inside its own mesh — the part must be a closed shape. Glass: thin glass such as bottles, lenses and panes. | Gemstone / Glass |
| Light Transmission | How much light passes through. 1 for clear stones and glass. | 0 – 1 |
| Index of Refraction (IOR) | How strongly light bends: 1.0 is air, 1.5 glass, 1.77 sapphire, 2.417 diamond. | 1.0 – 2.5 |
| Dispersion (Fire) | How much light splits into rainbow colours. Diamond 0.36, cubic zirconia 0.59, moissanite 0.75; 0 turns fire off. | 0 – 1 |
| Stone Colour | The body colour light takes on inside the stone. Optionally also sets the colour of the transparent look. | any colour |
| Colour Distance (× size) | How far light travels before it takes on the stone colour, as a multiple of the stone's size. Smaller = deeper colour; 0 = colourless. | 0 – 100 |
| Wall Thickness (× size) | Glass rendering only: how thick the walls are that light passes through, as a multiple of the object's size. | 0 – 4 |
| Sparkle (Environment Reflections) | How strongly the stone reflects its environment. | 0 – 5 |
Gemstone Presets
| Stone | IOR | Dispersion (Fire) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diamond | 2.417 | 0.36 | Colourless, very high brilliance and fire (natural or lab-grown). |
| Blue Sapphire | 1.77 | 0.26 | Deep blue corundum. |
| Ruby | 1.77 | 0.26 | Red corundum. |
| Emerald | 1.58 | 0.27 | Green beryl, softer sparkle. |
| Amethyst | 1.55 | 0.27 | Purple quartz. |
| Cubic Zirconia | 2.17 | 0.59 | Colourless diamond simulant with strong fire. |
| Moissanite | 2.5 | 0.75 | Colourless, more fire than diamond. |
| Aquamarine | 1.58 | 0.27 | Pale sea-blue beryl. |
| Blue Topaz | 1.62 | 0.26 | Bright sky-blue topaz. |
| Morganite | 1.58 | 0.27 | Peach-pink beryl. |
| Peridot | 1.67 | 0.33 | Yellow-green olivine. |
| Citrine | 1.55 | 0.27 | Golden-yellow quartz. |
| Tanzanite | 1.69 | 0.43 | Violet-blue zoisite. |
| Garnet | 1.75 | 0.3 | Deep wine-red garnet. |
| Pink Sapphire | 1.77 | 0.26 | Vivid pink corundum. |
Jewellery Metals
| Metal | Finish | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Platinum 950 | Polished | Polished platinum — the soft grey-white of engagement rings and bridal sets |
| Satin Platinum | Satin | Brushed / satin-finish platinum with soft, stretched highlights |
| 18K White Gold (Rhodium) | Polished | Rhodium-plated white gold — the bright white finish most white-gold jewellery is sold with |
| Palladium | Polished | Polished palladium — a lighter white metal for bands and settings |
| 22K Yellow Gold | Polished | Rich, deep yellow high-karat gold |
| 14K Yellow Gold | Polished | Paler, everyday 14-karat yellow gold |
| Satin Yellow Gold | Satin | Brushed / satin-finish yellow gold |
| Fine Silver | Polished | Bright, mirror-polished fine silver |
| Black Rhodium | Polished | Black rhodium plating for contrast settings and men’s jewellery |
The Transparent Look
Every gem material also keeps an ordinary look: its base colour, opacity and reflections. It is what appears wherever light cannot be traced through the stone:
- AR — AR Quick Look on iPhone and iPad, Scene Viewer on Android, and try-on.
- The WordPress and Shopify storefront blocks and the headless viewer package, until they are updated (the full configurator embed refracts).
- Gems & Glass Rendering Quality set to Transparent look only, and computers without a graphics processor.
- A stone with text, an uploaded image, a pattern or a design painted on it.
Lighting for Jewellery
Stones and polished metal show little but what they reflect, so the lighting environment matters more for jewellery than for anything else. Choose it in Project Settings > Lighting > Environment & Reflections.
| Environment | Best for |
|---|---|
| Studio (default) | The neutral studio every project has always used. Choosing nothing keeps it. |
| Jewelry studio | Stones and polished metal: a light tent with dark flags and small hard lights. Stones show their colour, contrast and sparkle; metal gets crisp dark edges. |
| Softbox | Bright, even product-photography light with soft reflections. |
| Daylight | An outdoor sky and ground (a small HDR image, loaded when the configurator opens). |
| Custom HDR | Your own panorama, uploaded as .hdr or .exr. |
Environment Rotation (0 – 360°) turns the environment around the product to move reflections and highlights. In the editor viewport the environment lights gem and glass materials only, so judge metals in Preview.
Use Your Own HDR
- 1In Environment & Reflections, choose Custom HDR and click Upload .hdr or .exr.
- 2Pick an equirectangular panorama (twice as wide as tall) in .hdr or .exr format, up to 200 MB.
- 3Your browser prepares it: an .hdr up to 2048 × 1024 is uploaded as it is; a larger .hdr or any .exr is reduced to 2048 × 1024 — keeping all of its light — and saved as .hdr, so shoppers download one small file.
- 4Click Save Settings. The editor, Preview and the Share view now use your environment.
Quality and Performance
| Rendering Quality | What shoppers see |
|---|---|
| Automatic (recommended) | Each device gets the best quality it can render smoothly: High on computers, Standard on phones, the transparent look on computers without a graphics processor, and a step down whenever frames get slow. |
| High | Full refraction with colour fire on every device. Older phones may stutter. |
| Standard | Refraction with fewer internal reflections and a lighter version of the colour fire. Smooth on most phones. |
| Transparent look only | No refraction anywhere: every gem and glass material shows its transparent look. Fastest. |
Tracing light inside a stone costs graphics time for every pixel the stone covers. Measured on a recent laptop (Apple M5 Pro) at 2560 × 1600, per frame — a smooth 60 frames per second leaves 16.7 ms:
| Scene | Transparent look | Standard | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ring with a diamond | 1.4 ms | 5.0 ms | 6.7 ms |
| A loose stone filling the whole screen | 1.3 ms | 8.6 ms | 59 ms |
Projects without gem or glass materials cost exactly what they did before. The viewer redraws while the shopper rotates or changes an option; a still view redraws only about four times a second. With Automatic quality, a device that cannot keep up steps down after about two seconds of slow frames. To check a quality yourself, add ?gemQuality=high, standard or fallback to a Share link.
Modelling Stones
Closed shapes
Each stone must be watertight, with every face pointing outward. Through a hole light leaks out and the stone looks hollow.
Stones as their own parts
Keep stones separate from the metal setting and name them clearly (Stone, Side stones) so they are easy to target.
Real facets
Sparkle comes from facets. Model the cut — a smooth sphere refracts but never sparkles.
Up to 100,000 triangles per stone
Larger stones, and animated or instanced meshes, render as glass instead.
With the AI Assistant
The AI Assistant and AI connections (MCP) know the gemstone presets, the metals and the lighting environments. Try:
- "Create a blue sapphire material and add it to the Stone options."
- "Make the centre stone a 2.5 IOR moissanite with more fire."
- "Light this project with the jewelry environment."
- "Check this project for problems." — the check reports gem materials whose transparent look is solid and variants that still carry an old copy of their material.
Troubleshooting
| What you see | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The stone looks hollow, or you see through it | The mesh has holes | Close the holes in your 3D software and upload a new version (the amber note in the editor names the part). |
| The stone looks dark or flat | Neutral studio lighting, or a deep stone colour | Choose Jewelry studio; raise Colour Distance for a lighter body colour. |
| Less fire on a phone than on a computer | Automatic quality uses Standard on phones | Set Rendering Quality to High if your shoppers use recent phones. |
| Stones look like plain glass in AR | AR viewers cannot refract light | Expected — the configurator shows the full stone. |
| Gold or platinum looks dark in try-on | No lighting environment chosen | Choose an environment in Project Settings > Lighting; try-on then reflects it. |
| A WordPress or Shopify block shows a transparent stone | Those blocks have their own viewer, not yet updated | Expected for now; their full configurator embed refracts. |