Challenges in the visualization of gem-gum factories

Static non-animated visualization

Visualizing the internal workings of a gem-gum factory over all the involved size scales
in just one picture is hard. Especially when there shall no be discontinuous jumps in scale.
The natural solution to that problem seems to be a log polar mapping generalized to 3D
See: Visualization methods for gemstone metamaterial factories
Whether such a depiction can helps for building an intuitive understanding remains to be seen.

dynamic animated visualization

• Challenges in speed visualization – stroboscopic illusion
• Acceleratingly racing along long assembly lines to give a feeling of relative length

3D was never build for modelling over so many size scales
Modelling everything on the same scale can leads to

• running out of floating point precision
• running into size scales where the 3D software rounds to
• other weird stuff

So one needs to hack around this and model on different size scales
A continuous cut-less animation over many size scales then faces the problem of plumbing several sequences
of scenes shot at different scalings (different scalings that making different scales the same scale) mathchingly.
This is super annoying, tedious and productivity quenching.

Texturing and rendering choices

How to visualize a gem-gum factory at different size scales physically as accurate as possible,
but still visually appealing and helpful?

Rendering gemstones as transparent optical gemstones makes only sense for the macroscale.
See: Visible wavelength light at the nanoscale

Mimicking a real physical microscopes contrast mechanism

Tho show something physically more accurate the the contrast should go down and things become blurry
leaving only the overall homogenous monochomous color.
To still see things really well despite all that optical blurring
an other non optical contrast mechanism must be added.

Emulating electron microscopy is not such a good idea since

• especially at the lowest scales everything becomes quite transparent (like in TEM images)
  
• practically this would be hard on the sample – well gem-gum sytems might cope

A really good contrast mechanism is what (cold neutral helium) matter wave microscopy would give.
This is extrelmely surfece sensitive. Pretty much no penetration into the material that is being imaged at at all.
This technology currently (2021) is still far from atomic resolution, but eventually shoud be able to achive that someday.
And then it should be an exceptionally useful tool.

In effect choosing to emulate a matter wave microscopes images look would
roughly mean keeping a scanning microscope like look all the way down to the smallest scales.

Downsides of the contrast mechanism mimicking approach:

• Can come over as bland and ugly.
• If not colorizes hard but just grayscale then can be hard for the viewer to decypher what is seen.
• Annoyingly the atomic precision of these sytems disallows for any artistic scratches and such.
  All the stuff that makes things pleasing to look at is out.

Atomistic texturing

As for when atomic details become visible several more challenges present themselves:

• The (crappy) compression algorithms of our time like to make a mess out of huge high spacial frequency patterns – confetti effect – moire effect
  
• Modelling all the atoms individually as highly resolved spheres is infeasible
• "displacement maps" introduce the same load but only at the final rendering
• bump-maps are cheap but one can see that it's fake

In case of diamond three textures for the different faces are needed

• 111 (3fold symmetry)
• 110 (2fold symmetry)
• 100 (4fold symmetry)

And they somehow need to be slapped on the right faces.

True atomistic modelling

For the tooltips modelling individual atoms as highly resolved spheres is feasible.
Here even a completely fake pretty metallic and colorful rendering is ok (and useful) since it's obvious that its not mimicking a microscopes contrast mechanism.

Related

• surface sensitivity
• contrast mechanism