The Gem Advisor by Octonus Software.

Example of scanned diamond loaded into the Gem Advisor software.

During the 1990's gemologists employed with Moscow State University (MSU) developed a number of software programs to aid the gemologist in the analysis of both rough and polished diamonds.  This software  is perhaps the most advanced of it's kind and features many options in the examination of cut quality for diamonds.  One of the primary features is ray trace analysis of any given diamond that can be created or loaded into the software. Ray tracing allows the student of gemology to monitor the path of light as it travels within a diamond and exits showing precise percentages of reflection and refraction within a diamond and how that impacts face up appearance.  Since we primarily deal in polished diamonds (not rough) we employ the use of these technologies (particularly DiamCalc and Gem Advisor) in our purchasing decisions and share with our clients the results on each and every diamond we feature on our website through the Gem Advisor software which is a free download courtesy of MSU.  The information to be garnered from this technology is often neglected by our clients which is why we are writing a tutorial to show you how to take full advantage of its features.  If you have not yet downloaded and installed this software you may want to for the sake of following along in this tutorial as it's really fun and cool to use!

In this first tutorial we will be covering the features of the Gem Advisor software since it is free and is also the software with which you will be using to aid  you in your online shopping with us here at The Ultimate Diamond Information Site.  First a breakdown of what the Gem Advisor shows us.

General Information.

If the diamond was scanned with a Sarin Machine capable of generating a 3D model and click on the General Information button they'll see a screen telling them the carat weight like the graphic on the left.  If the 3D model was generated by a Helium Scanner (also manufactured and sold by Octonus) you see quite a bit more data showing all the proportions of the scanned diamond as depicted in the graphic on the right including average measurements as well as minimum and maximum's on every single facet. 

Cut Quality

When you click on the "Cut Quality" button you see a screen telling you about the light return of the diamond being examined in both mono and stereo views (most human beings with 2 eyes use stereo vision).  Light return within a diamond however does not tell the whole story about diamond beauty.  Elements of contrast play a vital role in determining diamond appearance and beauty.  There are 2 primary elements that contribute to contrast within diamond and those are light leakage as well as facets reflecting back shadows of objects in the atmosphere.  The DiamCalc and Gem Advisor software take these elements of contrast into account and in our studies have noted direct correlations between human observation testing and these contrast scores.  The finest round brilliant cut diamonds we've inspected generally score in the .9x - 1.xx range on each of these characteristics. For a full discussion on Contrast Brilliance I refer you to our tutorial on this specific subject here.  If it appears light return is low but contrast high, this is a good thing so don't let a lower light return score scare ya.

The Lighting Environments within Gem Advisor

When you download and install the Gem Advisor software the very first thing you see is the diamond loaded with the default light view which is generally the "Office Lighting" view as depicted in the first illustration above.  If you leave this view you can always return to it by simply clicking the button that looks like this on the button menu. As indicated in the graphic below this shows the diamond to allow you to view a "virtual gem picture" of the actual scanned diamond and if you press the green play button (indicated by the blue arrow below), will generate a dynamic 3d movie rocking and tilting the diamond to show you, through virtual reality the brightness, fire and scintillation seen in this lighting environment.  If you would like to see a dynamic 3d movie, and you have already downloaded and installed the Gem Advisor software, here is a direct link to a Gem Advisor file generated on an actual diamond we have on our website.  We have a database of many different shapes, cut qualities and cutting styles  for you to view at this link when you are finished with this tutorial for further learning and comparison.

The default lighting environment we have loaded into the default view (in the graphic below) is one of "bright hemisphere lighting" which depicts how a diamond will appear if you were standing in a room with bright walls and the primary light sources are coming in through windows which your head and body are blocking.  In this view the diamond will be primarily reflecting the bright surrounding walls plus any available light.  The darker areas within the diamond would be reflecting back the shadows of the observer's head and body as they are looking into the face of the diamond and is akin to this actual photograph taken of this diamond especially when we change the backdrop to black.

Note how similar the photograph is to the actual model of this diamond.  Neat eh? This lighting environment which we custom created in the software and displayed through our photography emphasizes the optical symmetry quality of the diamonds showing details of craftsmanship.  Less than 1% of diamonds in the world are cut to this type of amazing precision.

You can change the lighting environments and scope views within the Gem Advisor software by simply clicking on the little light bulb button.

On the next page we'll explore these light views to help determine what meaningful information we can extract from them.