It has been quite a busy day but I managed to create a playable demo of Myha. It will help to discuss the project with Bob and Deki from my team.
Yesterday I showed the final island and I could prepare the first renders. How does it work? Myha is mainly a game in omni 3d. It means that the pre-rendered backgrounds are played in a cylindrical panorama in the Adventure Maker engine. It allows to look around at 360° in the static pictures, just like in Myst IV. In order to create the panoramic views, I had to render the pictures with a special distortion and a wide resolution (the picture is wrapped on a cylinder in AM, so it has to be wide enough). In the case of Myha, it is 4000x800. Here's the raw 3D render of the very first view of the game:
In this single view, we can see everything around the hero at 360°. The very left and right of the picture is behind. The middle is the front. Between is the sides. It is often disturbing to look at a flatten cylindrical image and try to find the good orientation, but I find it funny, as if we had eyes behind the head or could just look everywhere with the eyes of an insect!
Then I wanted to work the colors and ambiance of this world, in order to fit with the foggy that we could see in Myst. In order to add fog, I used a Z-depth pass:
The Z-depth is a very simple pass which can be very useful. It is made of black and white only. Everything that is near the camera is white, and everything that is far is black. In between it creates a gradient of greys depending on the distance.
With this pass, I could add the fog (I inverted the colors and changed the contrast of the Z), and then I updated the colors a little and obtained this final picture:
It is exactly the picture that I will be using in the game in the first 360° view. What result does it give in the game? This picture is in 4000x800 but the game runs in 1024x432 (which is close to the maximum resolution of Adventure Maker). We can only see a small part of this picture in the game when we rotate the head to look around. The following picture is a screenshot when we look on our right, and shows the result of the graphics in Myha:
In this picture we can continue to turn the head 360°, or move to the next picture to discover the island.