Well, there are several ways to do it depending on the tools in your modeler. Off the bat you need to figure out if you're going to use hard or soft modeling. By that I mean if you will use some sort of subdivision smoothing (catmull/clark..doo sabin) to smooth it out for render or if you will model with a much denser mesh but does not require subdivision smoothing. The benefit of the sub-d is that you are dealing with a much lighter cage that can be collapsed later to a dense mesh, if you hard model it you cannot go the other way to a lighter control cage.

This one I used a bezier curve (through points) to get the shape, then offset that and adjusted the bezier control points to give it thick and thin areas from the top view. Then I bridged (lofted) a surface of polygons between them, and then gave that surface thickness (shell). For the settings they are just cylinders with one cap extruded (inset) inward to hold the stone. I then deleted some polygons on the OD of the cylinder and welded the cylinders to the ends of the thickened surface of the pendant.

You could also do the same thing with sweeping a profile along two curve guides just as you do in MOI, really the modeling of something like this which is kind of organic and flowing is pretty much the same between NURBS and Sub-D.

For the stones I did a poly tutorial a long time ago found here: http://forums.polyloop.net/hexagon-tutorials/5118-diamond-tutorial.html that you can look at.



Yeah as Michael said it was a Poly model in Hexagon at the time. I was only trying to show another example of the Composer rendering and not throw poly modeling topics into the forum but since you asked...