Riven - Environments

This year I got to work on the 2024 remake of Riven, a classic puzzle title and the sequel to Myst. I worked under Richard Vander Wende, the original art director for Riven back in 1997. He is an amazing artist and visionary and working under him was a very educational experience, in the best way possible. I must admit the Myst series was a bit before my time, but Richard does a great job explaining why these worlds are so important, and why the details matter. I handled a lot of various art tasks for Riven, including helping with the character clothes, various props, machinery and vehicles, and set dressing spaces, but the vast majority of my work was figuring out the rocks. This was especially difficult as we were bringing this game to "high end" PCs and Quest on the same day, so whatever rock workflow we were going to use needed to work for both. I developed the rock workflow that we used on all of the islands, and worked with several of the artists on our team to help implement said workflow. We used Megascans as a base since scanned rocks have such high fidelity, and then turned them into usable game assets through a process of merging, booleaning and manual cleanup. That combined with some good old fashioned shader magic created landscapes that could capture the original high res presentation of the original games which used pre rendered graphics back in 1997. It was a real honor to help develop this game and its definitely the best work I've gotten to work on at Cyan.