Screeshots from MYST IV Revelations

[Yadla]

Nice to see you taking it easy
I didnt' wanted to worry you at all, as i would never be able to do such a good job.

U are right, when speaking about the animation effects, even if its not top of the art *static* rendering, i'm pretty convinced the immersion will be much better than ever before. I spoke before seeing The trailers

I encourage you !

[Biohazard]

Wow, 200th post !

Champagne les gars !

Oups, sorry, it's late and we've had some beers with the team in order to begin the WE correctly...

***Edit***
Thanx for your comments Yadla.
I did not imagine some ppl in France being awake at this hour. But, well, thats the morning anyways. OUla, temps d'aller dormir... ZZzzZZZzzz

[C00PER]

Wow! Really great shots! The original spirit of Myst is very recoglizable

[Da_elf]

hiya biohazard. nice shots. great art
congratulaltions on making your 200th post. hehe. i lost track of mine somewhere past 2000

[percydaman]

Anybody that loves the myst series of games, should read the series of books. I found them to be very well written and have read them over and over again!

[cocolas]

stunning work Biohazard!!!

personally I'm more of a FPS type of gamer (Unreal and the likes) but I have to say that the detail and quality put into this is some of the best I've seen.....

my favourite shot is the interior (third from the top)...i I like all the detail props and the lighting..

I'm glad you guys are keeping up the tradition on high quality cg work that's been the hallmark of the myst games.....

as you said, this would be a game to buy even to just look at, through it...even for people that are not fans of the series......and I'm very temped to get it

great work and congratulations to you and the rest of your team......

by the way was your team that worked on splinter cell game??...just courious...


paul.

[RErender]

I'll play if Gwen will give us hints for the puzzles :P I never got of the island on the first one

[Biohazard]

Lol Rerender, that's a tough mission! I guess there will be many walkthru floating on the internet as soon as the game will be released. For my own, that's how I've visited Riven and Exile, in order to catch the spirit, when I entered the project. Even if there are many Myst players on the team, I'm unfortunnately not (I feel more confident with an AK47 and some fellows in the Huey choper at the back). Anyways, this had not harmed our love to build CG environments of course.

By the way, this game will be on 3 DVDs (1 for the add-ons and extras, 2 for the game and ALL the language versions). I'm quite sure ppl will feel they've got for their money.

About Splinter, yes of course, we've had animators and modellers working prior on it, and some have returned to some of its sequel now (hint hint), as our team is stretching (when entering into the final render phase).

Lol Da_Elf, imagine 200 posts all telling ''If there's flickering, please contact vray@chaosgroup.com''. That's a duty.

By the way, I'd be happy to answer technical questions about our work as well, if something is bugging you. Feel free to ask.

Thanks all for your warm comments.
This is a great and helpfull community here, and I've been often amazed by the CG work realized and showed on theses pages. I'll gather your comments next week and send them to the team. They'll appreciate, for sure.

[Trapezium]

Hey great images, especially 1st, 2nd & 4th . Wouldn't it be so creepy to walk out of a cave in real life and see those giant stones just floating in mid air I wonder what's under them. That's the kind of questions I asked myself which helped me finish the first Myst

Did you guys use simcloth for those fairy wings?

What was the workflow for materials like anything you can say on...
Procedurals?
Standard vs. VRay materials?
Specular reflections?

What about VRayLights, were they of much use?

I'm not quite sure what you're saying about the way these images work. Are you saying that some of these images are rendered (or from a RT engine) with maps created via Bake3D?

Thanks for showing

[Biohazard]

Hi Trapezium!
If you roam on the mystobession forums (same links than pictures) you'll noticec that the fans are wondering about many aspects of the game (and were, even before any info was erleased). That's a part of the trip I guess.

Did you guys use simcloth for those fairy wings?

I've popularized Simcloth and Reactor on the prod quite early and it has been used for many things. Ropes, tents, dead palms lying on branchs, furnitures, robes, curtains, and so on... It was then snapshoted and transformed into an editable mesh to get rid of the weight of the animation (there are some noticeable exceptions though).

What was the workflow for materials like anything you can say on...
Procedurals?
Standard vs. VRay materials?
Specular reflections?

There is no absolute law here, but at the end, the material has got a bit too messy and complicated than I expected.
There are texture artists, at the begining, doing a great job by applying their art in unwarp UV.
Then come the 'falloff', 'blends', 'multi-subs', 'composite materials', 'Noise', 'cellular'...
Then come the accidentally 'multi-subs' into 'multi-subs', empty '10 slots composite', and 'RGB multiply' exploding the clamp limit of 100 where Vray is freaking.

So we've got great 2D art, mixed with topology/light depend materials and procedural.
There is very little use of VRay materials, blurry or specular reflection, or SSS. Our environments are huge and we cannot afford such expenses in matter of CPU time. But at some points, we've used them as well.

What about VRayLights, were they of much use?

Yes, not extensively, but you can find some VrayLights and Vray areashadows. They cost much when projected on 4.000.000 polys + displace, so we had to be cautious....

I'm not quite sure what you're saying about the way these images work. Are you saying that some of these images are rendered (or from a RT engine) with maps created via Bake3D?

I won't spoil the game, but as it is explained into the myst 4 forums, our engine let us show pre-rendered 360 environments (such as the one in this thread), and add many RT effects on them (because we're layering the info - Z, Alpha, plus some g-buffer stuff I won't speak about).
Plus many pre-rendered thinguies composited real-time in motion with their alpha (creatures for example), with some AI behavior.

I hope this answers your questions.

[nlo]

stunnig graphics...
i m not into adventure games since the infocom days...
but i'm tempted to buy that because of vray and you, biohazard, in this community .

btw how big was the team?

[jujubee]

The shots look spectacular. Very detailed indeed.

It looks like a realtime hardware implementation of HDRI lighting. I was wondering if most of the new games are using most of the maps on the net or if most games houses are producing their own HDRIs. Would you be kind enough to indulge me?

[Biohazard]

btw how big was the team?

I dunno if I can answer the exact number, but let say we were more than 40, most of the time (the whole team). That's a bunch of people.

It looks like a realtime hardware implementation of HDRI lighting

Wow, I'd love to get that in a near future. What I've seen at the last Siggraph was some real time GI and raytracing prediction and the guys were already getting a first bounce at 10fps with 10.000 polys.

In our case, that's pure V-Ray rendering, with no HDRI. We've used some of our environments as source of light, but they were low range. The effect is still stuning, when you're rendering a single object lighted by a former environment, and when it's then melting quite well.

[f97ao]

BioHazard. It's great to hear that you are working On Myst. It is in my opinion one of the most fun games out there. I think if more folks gave it a chance they would se how fun it is. What one should do is sit down with one or two friends with say a beer and some snack. Then you try to figure out the puzzles together. That is far more fun than to sit oneself.

I really recommend for your or anyone to take a peek at Schizm. It has very advanced graphics too and some great puzzles too, some of them are better than those you find in Myst.

I agree that Riven had the best graphics generally. Some of the pictures above, the forest and the blue pictures looks better and are far more advanced. But Riven had very realistic clean graphics. Myst3 was very different from different levels.

Generally Myst3 was fun but was disapointing. The graphics on 2 of the worlds, the start world and the "machine" world was very good. But the pinball world had terrible graphics and the forest world was not so great either.

We think that if you should use one game as a basis it should be Riven. It is far better than any of the other games. It was the only one where all the puzzles made sense, they could be real machines, and you could really feel that they had been used in this world before. In esp Myst3 you felt that these puzzles were just well puzzles. And that takes away the spirit alot. What I'm trying to say is that it's not a great thing if you approach a pussle and you think "Hmm, I wonder how the Myst team designed this thing to work". It should be "Ahh, hey this looks like they used it for fishing. They probably had to use those long arms up there to get those big looking fishes, and hmm what is that. Oh hey I looked at the paintings in the food storage, and they use that thing to package it in round balls to hang them up in the air protecting from animals....etc".

It's great that you use some AI for creatures and hopefully some more live things in Myst4. These have always been somewhat lacking, allthough the big nasty fish in Riven was very impressive, and the whales too.

Also I'm always worried that you will make the game too easy. Myst3 was far too easy in my opinion, and Myst1 was pretty easy too. We finished Myst3 on one day, Myst1 also. It's not that fun to finish a game in a day I think. It took us almost 2 weeks to solve Riven though and a few days to solve Schizm.
Perhaps you should toy with the idea of making a "very hard" lvl too. One thing that only Riven did but did very good, was that every puzzle had ONE main pattern, BUT there was always one expection. So you had all these buttons, only problem was that one was broken, so you really had to figure out how it all worked before you could solve it.
Personally I think you never should use the concept that a book has the complete solution for a puzzle. They should give hints but not give all the idea.

One simple way of creating 2 different lvls of difficulty without having to do two puzzles is this:
- Easy. The pictures in the books you find give a more complete solution to the puzzles
- Medium. There are less solutions in the books, pictures are missing or part-missing.
- Hard. There are only hints in the books no solutions at all.

This way you can make the puzzles _harder_, but since you give some help in the books, those that don't want to take the time to figure it all out will at least have a basic concept of how them work.

And I have more ideas if you have the time. (now i have to look at the trailer)

/Andreas
(bah, I should have been in the Myst team long ago. )

[graphicsgriffin]

Hi Gwen, Very wonderful, I am really pleased the way adventure games are developing in graphics,

I am a big adventure fan by the way, The original Myst, Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, The Longest journey,and Syberia of my Favourites.

I have a question about the fantastic URU : Ages Beyond Myst, it has a 3d engine, so was the graphics job different? (Your team did URU, right?)

And a technical question, about the interiors, as your team use VRay, the best renderer ever! (really), I would like to know what method was used for indirect illumination secondary bounces, (direct or photon mapping),

And how many bounces are used for interior and exterior renderings?

About modelling, you use max? or some kinda pluggin?

Sorry for so much questions , but the renders are really fantastic!

And I would appreciate any useful information about the render settings

By the way, the Myst series is one of the few games I see that they will have more and more sequels, coz the entire atmosphere is wonderful and the graphics are developing as new improvements are made to 3d programs and renderers, the puzzles are great though a little bit hard, (say, you will do something like Myst The 50th edition!!!)

Your's Faithfully