We'd like to share some background on the FerioWorks founders and Rigid Gems creators to unravel some of the mystery behind who's responsible for the gorgeous ray-traced 3D gemstones you see all over the FerioWorks website and social media pages.
FerioWorks was started in Japan in 2008 by Toshihiro and Yoshihiro Fukurono, twin brothers, but they had already been buying books to learn about programming, rendering, and ray tracing since they were 16 years old. Unfortunately, they were so ahead of their time that their formal education in Japan was not teaching them what they truly wanted to learn about software, programming, and rendering. In Japan, the educational system is one-size-fits-all, but it did not fit them.
At the time in Japan, programming and rendering weren't taught at education institutions, and being pragmatists, the Fukurono twins would wonder why they were learning information that they frankly had no interest in learning or using. What they wanted to learn about ray tracing and graphics rendering was impossible to learn at a traditional institution in Japan, even a university. High school is not mandatory in Japan, so the twins decided that they could learn more about their interests on their own through their own passion and dedication and eventually dropped out. By age 17, both Toshi and Yoshi were already programming thanks to all the knowledge they'd gained on their own about programming and ray tracing from numerous books, research papers, and hands-on practice. By this time, it was the 2000s.
They saw 3D graphics rendering and light rendering at the time in various demos and game trailers, including real-time demos by Paul Debevec, and they felt that the graphics rendering could look better. Their awe of HDR, graphic-rendering technology, post effects, and ray tracing helped the puzzle pieces fall into place: the Fukurono brothers took it upon themselves to make their own 3D graphics—all from scratch and without borrowing a single source code from anyone else—using ray tracing, which, after lots of experimentation, ended up becoming Rigid Gems.
Toshi and Yoshi's work on Rigid Gems was so extraordinary and impressive that Jon Peddie, the former head of SIGGRAPH Pioneers and a leader in programming technology, conducted an interview with Yoshi for his 2019 book "Ray Tracing: A Tool for All." In his book, Jon shed some light on the passion and motivation that Yoshi and Toshi had when they wanted to create a tool from scratch using ray tracing technology that can perfectly simulate gemstones in different lighting.
So to anyone out there who is having difficulty believing in themselves and what they want to do in life, you can see that Toshi and Yoshi's hard work and belief in themselves paid off, even in a country where it's frowned upon to break the mold and be an innovator. We know firsthand that great things can happen for anyone if you truly believe in yourself too.
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