Landscape Tools

Does anyone know what sort of tools houses like Cyan Worlds and the former Presto Studios used to create their amazing prerendered Myst and Journeyman Project worlds (in particular, landscapes)? I've looked at packages like Vue, but do they really offer the capability to generate such an enormous amount of material? It seems to me that games like Riven must have been rendered off of several ginormous 3d models... perhaps I've just bought into the illusion.

Anyone out there had much experience creating photorealistic (static) geography? Do you use photo overlays? What sort of workflow do you have?

 

Riven was Softimage 3D (not XSI), the very first myst was strata 3D, I think Exile (the presto studios one) was 3Ds max, and the latest Uru games I belive was a combination of in-house tools and modeling apps as Cyan created it's own realtime engine to handle high polys, curves surfaces etc.

I read about the Myst 3 exile screens taking at least an hour for each frame (it was stitched panoramic images like quicktime VR). They also had various issues with crashes and such while rendering because the scenes where so dang huge.

But most of these games where built right in the 3D app as far as I know, and the software is getting better and better. Softimage XSI now has a gigapolygon core to handle very large scenes without crashing and I am sure other apps are doing that also. It all comes down to rendering speed though, these companies had rendering farms and it STILL took that long lol.

I love the graphics in all of those games (never seen journeyman though) Riven and exile were my favorite. Great design and style.

Anyway, that's the extent of my limited knowledge.
-Jeremy