GemDiagram Docs

Solid vs. Realistic Render

The viewport's display bar has two render modes: Solid and Realistic. They trade rendering speed for optical accuracy, and you'll switch between them constantly while designing.

Solid mode

Solid mode draws each facet as a flat, lit surface — fast, no light tracing, no refraction. It's the mode you'll use while actively editing tiers, since it updates instantly with every angle or distance change. The stone always renders as a neutral gray in Solid mode, regardless of the body color you've picked in the Material card — flat shading isn't tracing light through the gem, so there's no color to tint.

Realistic mode

Realistic mode runs a ray-traced shader that actually simulates light entering the stone, refracting, bouncing off facets via total internal reflection, and exiting — the same physics Ray Studio visualizes path-by-path, but baked into a live, shaded render instead of a diagram. This is where you see:

  • Body color, tinted in by color depth (Beer–Lambert absorption along each ray's path).
  • Dispersion ("fire") — the colored flashes from splitting white light by wavelength, scaled up from the material's true dispersion value so it's visible at the viewport's scale.
  • Refraction, using the chosen material's real refractive index.
  • Pleochroism, for the one material that has it — see Pleochroism (Alexandrite).

Realistic mode is slower than Solid because it traces every facet plane per pixel, so designs with a great many facets can lag during interactive edits — switch to Solid while tweaking tiers, then flip back to Realistic to check the final look.

Note

Realistic mode has a facet-plane cap (256 planes). If your design exceeds it, GemDiagram automatically falls back to Solid and logs a warning to the browser console — there's no visual error in the UI, so if Realistic looks unexpectedly flat, check whether your design has grown unusually complex (lots of tiers, lots of index positions, or heavy frosting).

Frosted facets in each mode

Frosted facets render differently per mode: Solid mode shows a rough, matte gray finish; Realistic mode runs a dedicated frosted-glass shader that scatters light through the roughened surface, which is much closer to how a real frosted facet looks under light.

Switching modes

Click Solid or Realistic in the display bar above the viewport, or press R to toggle between them.

Choosing a mode while you work

  • Designing/editing tiers: Solid — instant feedback as you drag sliders.
  • Checking color, fire, or pleochroism: Realistic — this is the only mode that actually renders those.
  • Final review before export: Realistic — what you see here is the closest preview to how the stone will actually look once cut and polished, given the material you've chosen.

Tip

The Screenshot and Video features capture whatever mode is currently active — switch to Realistic before exporting a screenshot or video if you want the rendered color and fire, not the flat Solid look.