Toshihiro and Yoshihiro (Toshi and Yoshi) Fukurono started making Rigid Gems in 2008 after years of studying through books and hands-on experimentation how to program, render graphics, and add post effects. (See previous blog about the pre-Rigid-Gems days here.) The brothers were inspired by demos and trailers and quickly analyzed the lighting and rendering. They began using graphics and physics that no one at the time was using in order to make game graphics look as stunning as the art on game cases, with the main goal of making a demo that no one had ever made before, so they ended up creating all the tools that a game engine would offer as well as a high-end editor that didn't exist at the time. This framework would lead to the Rigid Gems demo.
In order to have a full grasp on all of the code that was being used, the framework that they built was made completely from scratch, without any source code borrowed from other people. This way of working comes from the fact that they had to learn what they know through their own efforts in order for all the technology that they needed to use to make total sense to them, as a way of doing research.
If it wasn't for the conviction they had to learn everything on their own, they wouldn't have ended up making the early Rigid Gems more over-the-top than necessary to fully display what they could do, unlike other demos of the time which would only show one feature per demo. Not satisfied with that simplicity and using their demo as a way to show what they've learned, Toshi and Yoshi set out to create a graphics software that made the most of a computer's GPU.
In 2009, Toshi and Yoshi were working on Rigid Gems Ver. 1.0. They wanted to make a demo where the rendered objects could be moved in real time. Since ray tracing was heavy on GPU at the time, they chose a hybrid method: to use ray tracing only on the gemstones and use rasterization on the other objects.
In the beginning of Rigid Gems, Toshi and Yoshi brought it all to the table to pursue what they loved and ended up making the beginning of what you see now in 2022.
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