Millions of people,
computer literate and otherwise, have heard of the CD-ROM game Myst, originally
published in 1993 and developed by Robyn and Rand Miller, the brothers
behind Cyan (Spokane, WA). Indeed, Myst has sold more than a million copies,
and to date it is the best selling CD-ROM game of all time. Myst set new
criteria for what a computer game could be, with its contemplative pace,
total lack of fast-twitch violence, mysterious non-goal-directed game
play, and - as most who played the game would agree - graphics so striking,
they exceeded any previously produced in a game.
With such a legacy to surpass, it's no wonder that Cyan took four years
to produce Riven, the sequel to Myst. But as the saying goes, it was worth
the wait. Riven is truly stunning and is even more refined and well developed
then Myst.
For those not familiar with Myst and Riven, both titles are an experience
in the Tolkienesque D'ni civilization - an ancient and fantastic culture
in which physical worlds called Ages can be created by writing their detailed
descriptions in specially prepared books. In Myst, players found themselves
on an island attempting to unravel a mystery spanning several Ages and
involving Atrus and his two sons. Riven's story is built upon Myst, with
Atrus reappearing to charge the player with the objective of capturing
his father, Gehn, and freeing his wife, Catherine, from her prison island
somewhere in the Age of Riven.
The graphics in Myst were, at the time, groundbreaking. The photorealistic
3D rendered world displayed a level of detail and beauty not known to
games. There was also no interface per se; the images filled the screen,
and players wandered through by clicking to go up, down, left, and right.
But as beautiful as the graphics were in Myst, Riven goes further. The
imagery and its accompanying soundtrack are cinematic. As you explore
Riven, each frame makes you feel as if you are in a unique space that
could actually exist. Scenes have amazing texture, depth, and presence.
Lighting, both outdoor and indoor, is not only convincing but often provides
a theatrical feel that establishes and holds each set's mood. Riven's
oceans ripple and reflect their environs naturally. Its craggy terrain
and caves display marvelous rocky detail. The live action sequences and
animation integrate seamlessly.
"Rand and Robyn knew Riven would be bigger than Myst", says
Jason Baskett, CG artist/animator. "They wanted the next level of
graphic reality." And they got it. The Cyan artists' attention to
detail throughout the title is astonishing. For instance, common shortcuts
such as bump maps were rarely used in lieu of geometry. This means essentially
every object and sub-object are fully modeled right down to the individual
details, such as the screws. Whereas many CG images are created using
single-sided models that accommodate just one camera view, Riven's models
are equally detailed from 360 degrees. "There are things on the backsides
of models that the player will never see," says Tim Greenberg, CG
artist/animator.
To achieve this level of graphics, Cyan's first major decision was to
switch from the Mac-based Vision3D from Strata, which was used to develop
Myst, to the SGI version of Softimage 3D and Mental Ray (both from Softimage)
for rendering. The reasoning was due to Softimage's ability to handle
more complex geometry and its superior texture capabilities. Mental Ray,
a shader-based renderer, would be need for lighting, shadows, and optical
effects - not to mention its distributed rendering and allowance for creating
custom shaders.
All of the game's objects were modeled in Softimage using B-splines or
NURBS with only the islands themselves created using polygonal geometry.
"B-Spline geometry provided more control for most objects while the
polygonal geometry enabled us to break the large island objects apart
to facilitate world assembly and more efficient rendering" says Baskett.
Each island was produced from intricate hand drawings, which were scanned,
detailed in Photoshop, and saved as gray scale maps. These were then used
in Softimage as displacement maps to create the island topology. Everything
else was individually modeled and textured. As the Cyan artists worked
on each object, they would consider how it might function if real, how
its function would affect its look, and then devise its geometry and texture
maps accordingly. For example, in real life a lever would look worn around
its joints and handle, so the artists would build in that level of detail.
Creating and applying Riven's image maps was actually more complicated
than the modeling process. Initially, Cyan traveled to New Mexico to take
photos - hundreds, which all had to be catalogued - to serve as the texture
bases. Next, artists spent hours in Photoshop painting, editing, and perfecting
each texture. In addition to texture maps, bump and transparency maps
were used. In fact, working with image maps was so essential to the process
that alongside each artist's Indigo II Extreme was a PowerMac with 73
MB of RAM used mostly for working on texture maps in Photoshop. Artists
would tweak textures in Photoshop and apply them to the 3D models in Softimage.
Next they'd render the textured model, evaluate how it looked, and return
to Photoshop to make corrections and start the cycle all over again. Incidentally,
Riven's maps range in size to as large as 80MB, though a typical map averages
around 2MB.
Lighting Riven's numerous scenes was complex as well. Some scenes required
as few as four lights, but occasionally, a scene would need more than
100 lights to achieve the effect Cyan artists were seeking. Exterior lighting
consisted of four Infinite lights (a light source with direction but no
apparent position): a shadow casting sunlight, a fill light opposite the
sun, a ground bounce light, and a blue-sky bounce light. The interior
shots presented much more complex lighting problems, often requiring numerous
shadow casting area lights found in Mental Ray. Area Lights produce soft,
natural-looking shadows by projecting light from a 2D or 3D object rather
than from the single-point sources common to most CG programs.
Cyan's numerous custom shaders provided much of the unique and natural
look of the game. Shaders are small programs that plug-in to a renderer,
such as Mental Ray, and expand its capabilities. Karl Stiefvater, CG technical
director, created several suites of shaders that Cyan artists used to
produce realistic lighting, water, camera lens, and landscape effects.
For instance, Stiefvater developed a glare shader to provide a realistic
flare around brightly highlighted areas. It was used throughout the game,
he notes, from the bright sky that filters through trees on one island
to the blazing speculars reflecting off a golden elevator on another island.
Stiefvater also developed various landscape shaders. One shot in particular
illustrates how Greenberg applied these for natural-looking results. The
shot consists of a spherical hive structure (the rebel stronghold) supported
by gnarly tree roots; it's located in a dark lake at the bottom of a crater
surrounded by shear cliffs. The game required a fly-through of the entire
scene, which normally would mean using the largest and most detailed texture
maps possible on the cliffs. Otherwise, players might notice the lines
that delineate tiled textures or enlarged pixels where textures have been
excessively enlarged. But such maps also can be prohibitively large. So
instead, Greenberg applied a landscape shader that used a noise function
to blend smoothly between three relatively small tiled textures, which
were revealed based on their elevation relative to the crater model. "This
revealed or hid the striated texture according to the dips, curves, and
bumps of the crater's geometry," says Greenberg.
More of Stiefvater's shaders were used to achieve the natural looking
water that appears in numerous scenes throughout the game. Water was created
by applying three shaders to single polygons: the WaterSurface shader,
which duplicates watery reflectance and transparency; the Submerge shader,
which produces vertical light falloff with depth; and the Ocean shader,
which produces waves.
The shaders had such a positive impact on Riven's overall look that many
shots developed before the shaders were finished were rerendered with
the shaders. This also kept the game's look consistent. In fact, these
shaders have proven themselves so well that a spin-off company Lume, Inc.
(San Francisco), will be selling them not only for Softimage but for 3DS
MAX, Alias/Wavefront, and LightWave as well.
To give you an idea of how complex some of these scenes were, consider
these stats for just one island, the Temple island. It has more than 2
million faces, 20,872 models, 96 lights, and 17,985 textures and thousands
of texture and material shaders. Just to load the scene in Softimage required
two hours.
As for animation, the characters in Riven are primarily composited video.
For the scenes that do include animation, Cyan artists used two types,
Cinepak and an in house developed runtime animation; occasionally, both
were used to animate the same element under different circumstances for
varying effects. Cinepak was used for animation such as the tram that
transports the player between islands; this animation consists of multiple
Cinepak compressed frames produced at 15 frames per second. The runtime
animation was developed by Mark DeForest, effects programming engineer.
It was used to produce such elements as fireflies and smoothly rippling
waves in some 750 masked water shots. "The process applies a series
of sine waves to a single masked image," says DeForest. "This
generates a data file that tells each line of pixels where to move".
Although human characters weren't modeled and animated, they still demanded
a lot of attention. There are numerous live-action shots, and these required
that cameras and lighting match as closely as possible. Artists also had
to composite the live shots with the prerendered backgrounds, which they
accomplished using Ultimatte software and a blue screen set. "We
used a scene diagram that detailed the positions of each object, light,
and camera to set up each live shot," notes Greenberg.
The scene diagrams were set up in Softimage using real world units, which
enabled artists to position stairs, doorways, and other essential scene
elements. "We also placed the equivalent of an 18% gray card in test
renders to provide a starting point for color temperature and exposure,"
says Greenberg.
Richard Vander Wende, who co-directed Riven, used multiple studio lights,
scrims, and diffusion sheets to soften shadows and match lighting between
the CG and live shots. Color balancing the live shots was a painstaking
process of carefully observing, experimenting, and closely duplicating
the CG lighting in the studio. The Ultimatte software provided real-time
previews of the actors composited over the 3D prerendered scenes. Artists
also used it to mask key foreground elements, such as the bars of a cage
that confine the player in the game's opening scene. Interestingly, the
cage begins as real bars: a live actor interacts with the real cage, which
then imperceptibly fades into a CG version of the cage, which animates
open to release the player into Riven at the end of the opening shot.
Each shot also has corresponding alpha-channel masks that were used to
composite the live action over the CG backgrounds. Michael Sheets, CG
compositing, used Adobe After Effects to refine and tweak each set of
masks and to produce the finished composite. Select live shots also were
morph edited, which enabled several takes to be seamlessly cut together.
This made it easier to produce multiple game play variations without the
need to reshoot each entire sequence.
Rendering Riven was an enormous endeavor. There are about 4000 frames
in the final title. Even with as many as 12 Indigo II Extremes, two Solid
Impacts, and four Challenge L Servers, Riven's huge model created serious
production bottlenecks.
After each series of frames was rendered, game play and navigation was
previewed using a custom HyperCard stack called World Starter, which was
written by Richard Watson, lead programmer. This enabled Cyan artists
to click through any part of Riven sequentially - looking right, left,
up, or down - while automatically loading the corresponding image for
viewing. As such, they could play each game segment and verify that its
navigation was smooth and camera placement consistent. Each sequence was
carefully reviewed and evaluated by Robyn Miller, Richard Vander Wende,
and Rand Miller. Every bug and suggested improvement was noted in World
Starter's comment field, which was used to track and perfect the game's
final version.
As you might imagine, the scope of the computer graphics involved in Riven goes
far beyond the sampling detailed here. Sophisticated software and hardware notwithstanding,
it took and extraordinary amount of energy, creativity, and dedication to create
Riven. The result is an extraordinary adventure in a class by itself. Source:
UNRAVELING RIVEN by Tim Forcade, CGW contributing editor Computer
Graphics World February 1998: Game production techniques in Cyan's sequel to Myst
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