If you’re an engineer, you may have heard about ray tracing, but most of you may not know anything about it; however, I would bet that every one of us has seen CGI showing light being reflected and refracted in crystals or gems in games like Final Fantasy, and we end up comparing it to the gemstones we see in the real world.
For some kids, finding quartz rocks and marvelling at how the light would reflect off of all their flat surfaces is a treat to find in nature. Toshi and Yoshi Fukurono—the founders of FerioWorks and the creators of Rigid Gems—had that very experience when they went hiking in the mountains together for fun when they were kids. Finding a shiny rock in the dirt made them not only moved by nature's beauty but come to seek out what a translucent or transparent rock such as a gemstone can do to light.
With the PlayStation 2 and then 3 demonstrating state-of-the-art graphics for their time, the Fukurono twins weren't satisfied with the fogginess and lackluster look of objects that were supposed to shine like diamonds and wanted to go a step beyond: they wanted to make realistic gemstones glimmer in real time. They used offline ray-tracing tools and Radiosity to create the 3D surroundings, but they weren't pleased with how the results they were getting in the offline tools looked vastly different from real-time 3D CGI.
What they used as inspiration and to be the benchmark of how a ray-traced simulation should look, though, was none other than the quartz crystals they found when they were spending time in the mountains and used as a reference and decoration for their desks. It all goes full circle.
More to come in the next blog!
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