How Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog are reimagining gaming’s most iconic adventurer.
When Lara Croft first leapt onto screens in 1996, she was a few hundred polygons and a fistful of pixels. Thirty years later, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis reimagines that same adventurer with technology the original team could only dream of. Through it all, one goal held steady: she had to look like Lara.
For a generation of players, their first adventure with Lara unfolded on PlayStation. Tomb Raider and PlayStation came of age together in the mid-nineties, each helping shape what that new era of gaming could be. Thirty years later, that connection still resonates, and Lara’s latest journey continues on PlayStation 5.
“Now we have that technology and the computing power, we ask, how do we make this the most realistic-looking Lara while sticking with that original design?”
For the character team, the 1996 design is the anchor every choice answers to. “When the original Lara was made, we could only have a certain number of polygons, a certain number of textures,” says Brendon Bengston at Crystal Dynamics. “There were a lot of things we wanted to do to make things look realistic that we just didn’t have the technology for. Now we have that technology and the computing power, so we ask, how do we make this the most realistic-looking Lara while sticking with that original design?”
Every console generation since has moved that design a step forward. The PlayStation 2 era of Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld gave Lara smoother geometry and more expressive animation, and the Survivor trilogy pushed her detail and realism further still. Each leap added polygons, texture, and nuance, and each one answered back to that same 1996 silhouette.
For the concept team, the harder challenge was balance: pushing the fidelity forward while keeping her instantly recognizable. “You want them to feel believable, but you also want them to look recognizable,” says Aleksandra Skiba, Senior Character Concept Artist at Flying Wild Hog. “You have to figure out what you can do now to make them better.”
The leap from 1996 is most visible in the details that used to be impossible. Take her hair. “Back in the first couple of Tomb Raider games, it was all polygons, all big shapes,” Bengston says. “Now we are able to create hair cards and craft exact strands.” Hair cards are thin, overlapping strips of semi-transparent texture, layered to mimic real clumps of hair rather than the solid, helmet-like shapes of the past. The difference is in the motion. “How does the bang move? What does the ponytail feel like? What does the braid feel like? We can get in and craft every nook and cranny.”
Her skin carries the same fidelity. “We can do a lot of things with our materials for the skin. We have subsurface scattering, we have flow maps,” Bengston says. Subsurface scattering is the effect that makes skin look alive rather than plastic, light sinking slightly into the surface and glowing back out, the way your ear looks lit from within when the sun is behind it. The face goes further still. “We can craft custom blend shapes so that when Lara squinches, we see bespoke lines on her face, on the forehead, when she smiles or when she frowns.” Blend shapes are sculpted facial poses the game moves between, letting a single face form thousands of natural expressions. “We weren’t able to do that not long ago. Using this technology from Epic in Unreal has let us take the characters to the next level, not just in their static model but in how they move and emote.”
“We actually hired a tailor to create an actual outfit for her. They made it, we put it on a mannequin and scanned it, and now we have a real-world asset of the digital version.”
To dress Lara believably, the team leaned on the real world. “Early on we decided to leverage a scanning pipeline,” Bengston says.
