Gehn’s desk in his 233rd age is supposedly organized just as his father’s desk was, in D’ni. Today, we have the beginnings of a few of the objects featured in that layout.
These were rendered in Unreal, but they are currently using stand-in materials and textures.
Just a small update today, with an object some of you may recognize. This is a high-poly model, where an artist goes all-out to produce the most detailed, accurate, beautiful model of an object as they possibly can, without any regard for poly count or performance.
While we’re pretty confident that our engine could handle a model like this in realtime, the next step will be to create the low-poly model, which judiciously reduces our polygon count without sacrificing accuracy and detail.
Earlier this week, the gaming news website PCGamesN published an article about the Starry Expanse Project, featuring an interview with us! If you’re interested in getting to know the team and our project’s history, it’s a great read. Check it out!
The process of recreating a game like Riven requires a lot of guess-and-check work. Matt, one of our artists, has been gradually figuring out the exact placement of each tree in the Jungle Island jungle, and the precise shape that the pathway follows. This is a constant struggle for us – the placement and shape of every object is triangulated using the original game renders (and other various resources). We use temporary “blocking” geometry, in order to lay everything out in position, before final assets are modeled.
Here’s a quick shot of an area in the Jungle that’s being “camera matched” currently:
We’ve shared a few of these images in the past, but the jungle is a seemingly never-ending area! Once the positions of the trees and other jungle objects are locked down and double-checked, another artist will start adding detail and bringing the place to life.
We are committed to making our game a multilingual experience. One aspect of that push gathering translations of all text and speeches in Riven, and as we have mentioned before, we have partnered with OHB in order to do just that. If you’re interested in helping translate Riven, check out the project page over at GULP.
Another aspect, however, is the actual implementation of those other languages. We’ve shown you guys the custom fonts being built by Vincent, our in-house typographer, before (Atrus, and some of Gehn), but today we’d like to share his efforts towards multilingual support.
The main problem, of course, would be accents and other characters that were not present in the original game. In order to create these, Vincent printed out a sheet of text using our Gehn font, and then drew in the accents by hand. These were then scanned back in, and used as the basis for what is now in the font.
This is the first of our fonts to receive this treatment, but the Atrus font will eventually have all of these characters as well.
We’ve been showing off the Jungle island schoolhouse a lot recently, because its one of our fastest-progressing assets. The work in here is now entering the “review” phase, meaning that it’s pretty much all done – just needs a few tweaks here and there. We’re pretty confident that what you see here will be at least pretty close to what the final area will look like. Check it out!
(Beware, these files are pretty high-resolution)
While we were pretty happy with our Mysterium 2014 presentation, many of the elements we showed off were incomplete. We’ve been working at polishing a lot of aspects of the Jungle Island Basin, and today we’d like to share a status update.
Davis, another talented member of our art team, has been hard at work for the last few weeks on an updated model of the basin terrain. While we have not yet textured the model (the sculpting is not yet complete, which needs to happen first), we think it’s just about ready to show the world.
Most notably missing from last year’s terrain model were the vertical ridges that are such iconic features in the original game – now meticulously restored!
At the same time, Will continues the Sisyphean task of stick-walkway placement, in the village. Will has been assigned to this task since before last Mysterium, and it’s a doozy. He’s been placing sticks individually, to ensure that their locations are exactly accurate to the walkways in the original. Here are a few key areas he’s been working on:
We’re holding off on bringing these updates into Unreal until they’re closer to being totally finished – these images are just snapshots from Maya, and shouldn’t really be judged on their looks. We’ll focus on making them look great as soon as the modeling is complete!
This week, we’re showing off some of the texture work that has been taking place in the schoolhouse! When we demoed this area at Mysterium last year, it was in a fully modeled, but untextured state – now one of our artists, Tim, is working to rectify that!
We haven’t put the new textures into Unreal yet, but in the meantime here are a few renders!
Note that these images are not representative of final assets, there’s still plenty of work to be done here. We’re pretty happy with how they’re coming along, however. You can see more of Tim’s work in last year’s Mysterium demo – he was responsible for the Villager that opens the door when you knock.
Meanwhile, work continues on modeling Gehn’s Office on the 233rd age. As modeling work wraps up on the upper level, Kelly has begun to look at the objects in Gehn’s Bedroom. Here’s her latest object, the nightstand:
As soon as we’re happy with the quality and accuracy of the models, texturing can begin. Kelly modeled a bunch of objects for last year’s demo, including the schoolhouse area!
We’ll wrap up with a reminder that we now have a forum! Come by and hang out!
The weather outside may be frightful, and it may have been a few months since we’ve updated you guys on our doings, but work continues regardless! Here are a few updates on the content we showed you guys last time.
First up, the bushwhacking efforts in the jungle are going well. For those just joining us, most of the work produced by our art team begins as rough blocking geometry, which may not be exactly accurate in terms of shape or detail, but are extremely accurately placed, thanks to the system of camera matching we use (object triangulation using the original game renders).
The colored outlines are our geometry, the background images are original renders from Riven.
The rest of the art team, meanwhile, continues to work on their projects. 233 continues to shape up – here are a few of the props that have been developed so far:
Texturing for these models will begin soon!
Finally, we are working on fleshing out the Jungle Island Basin area that we showed at Mysterium, filling in the gaps of missing objects and textures from Mysterium. Here’s one such object, a fishing net from the village, which has been modeled but not yet placed:
Now, bundle up and stay tuned for more updates; we’re heading back into production season!
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