Gem Interior

[wdmartin]

The next phase in my campaign involves the heroine plunging into the heart of seven tainted ioun stones to destroy them from the inside out by confronting the evil spirits inhabiting them. Here's a very rough first draft of one:

Gem-Interior-Draft-01.jpg

I am not satisfied with it. It's simultaneously too busy and also fails to adequately convey the crystalline structure of the environment. It feels like the approach of layering assorted crystal textures on top of one another and adding shadows and highlights may be a dead end for an optically complex object like a gem.

Any suggestions or feedback?

[madcowchef]

Gem.jpg I'd use faceting to convey the crystalline nature of the location, with large facets on central floor and smaller thinner ones going up to imply walls curving upwards. Something like this but with more time spent on it than I did.