Here’s a diamond falling down and rolling a tiny bit.
The model came from 3dlapidary.com (it’s the “Novice 7” by Fred W. Van Sant.)
The motion was done with Blender’s Bullet physics.
The rendering was done with Yafray.
The Blender sequencer was used to make the animation and add a glow.
http://www.youtube.com/?v=it3KXsIFniw
Note: YouTube seems to default to scaling the video up, so it may look bad.
To fix it, click the small square in the group of squares on the bottom right of the video.
Really nice, coderdave! I would like to see it run with caustics (both refracted and reflected) showing up on the ground plane to add to the realism. Very slick work, tho… cool.
Great Work 
Please Oh PLease Tell me how you used the Bullet engine in normal animations
Here’s a small tutorial on how to use Bullet physics in a normal animation.
From the default Blender scene
Add a plane
Move it below the cube
Scale the plane up to be a large floor
Get back to object mode and select the cube
Go to the logic panel (F4)
Click Actor, Dynamic, then Rigid Body
Click Bounds (you can leave it the Bounds set as “Box” for this example)
Go to the World Buttons in the Shading panel (F8)
Under the “Mist / Stars / Physics” tab, click the drop down menu that says Sumo
Change it to Bullet
Press P to start the game engine. The cube should fall to the floor.
Press Esc to stop the game engine.
You can rotate the cube to make it bounce around more before it comes to rest
At the top of the Blender window, click Game -> Record Game Physics to IPO
Start the game engine again with P
When the motion stops, press Esc to exit the game engine
Open up an IPO Curve Editor window, and see that the IPO curves have been added.
With the mouse in the 3D window, press Alt-A to run the animation.
You can now render out the animation.
Some information was posted on this in the “New feature test” thread. It started here and went on to the next page:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=502259#502259
I might do that, but it will take a while to finish the rendering.
mzungu, here’s an update with caustics.
I don’t think the caustics add that much to it. Maybe with more blur it would look better?
The lighting has been changed to increase the contrast, so it looks more sparkley.
DivX video
http://www.archive.org/download/Falling_Diamond_2_DivX/falling_diamond2.avi
QuickTime video
