I just found this on Thom Schillinger's blog, 3DConceptualDesigner.com:
Project Review: CYAN Kahlo World

There's some great Kahlo concept-art that I've never seen before, including a detailed concept of the fabled Kahlo "player mount".

For those who don't know, Kahlo is an age that Cyan designed and modeled quite some time ago for Uru, but never released. (I don't know why. Matthornb said here that it had to do with trouble implementing the rideable animals.) From the screenshots I've seen, the age seems to have been quite complete.

Moderators: Please move this topic if it belongs elsewhere. Thanks!

_________________
Merle
MOULagain KI#: 00049828

Bloody BRILLIANT mate! Exactly the kind of things we need, and an amazing find!

Very neat.

_________________
MOULagain Ki # 01675069

Very nice find Merle! Thanks for sharing it.

I'll be damned if that guy wasn't the one behind another old Uru sketch whose author was never identified.. I don't have it at hand, but it was an old blue and white sketch of an underground area with an odd globe-ish building.. Pretty hard to describe. It was one of the pictures released through the old DniGuild.com puzzles...

[edit] Found the picture: here (which is where I should have looked for it in the first place)

Last edited by aloys on Tue Feb 23, 2010 2:03 am; edited 1 time in total

Aloys, thank you, and you're welcome! A while back, I set up a Google Alert to email me weekly with any new search results for "cyan worlds"; sometimes it turns up something good (this is the best so far!)...I can't really take all the credit .

About the globe-building concept: that's the exact picture I had in mind when I read your post! I went to look for it on the DPWR Gallery (and found it), and then came back here to ask you if it was the one you meant. That's when I saw that you had already added the same picture!

_________________
Merle
MOULagain KI#: 00049828

Wasn't that an old concept for Dereno's above-ground terrain that might've eventually been released?

Or was that just a rumor... I can't remember anymore.

This is gorgeous concept art, and it tremendously expands our view of Kahlo.

Very, very exciting stuff!

Now if only Cyan could complete this world somehow...

And now we know what Venalem would have looked like.

_________________
My Pony is slowly sinking . . . okay, maybe not so slowly . . .

I wonder if the concept for Venalem, at least in part, was used elsewhere. The linking into a glacier sounds like what happened in one of the Myst V ages, can't remember its name offhand at the moment.

So that was Venalem... Wow. Thanks for finding that, Zardoz. Thom Schillinger's Kahlo post did say that it was part of his "continuing series of posts on Cyan", but I didn't check for others before starting this thread.

It looks like Aloys was right about Thom being the artist behind the unidentified piece of concept art. Now we also know the name of the age.

After reading Zardoz's post, I went back to Thom's blog to look for more Cyan-related Project Reviews, and found these:
Project Review: Cyan Worlds URU: Part I (I'm not sure if this one is old news.)
Project Review: CYAN's Uru Scorched Earth. Thom says on the blog that it was the last piece he did for Cyan.

Raniass'i, you're thinking of Taghira. (I couldn't remember, either! ) I'm not sure exactly how Cyan uses their concept art...but I wouldn't be surprised if some recycling happens. The idea reminds me of what Robyn said in the Riven soundtrack liner-notes about "stealing bits and pieces" of the "Bonus Track" that was never used in the game.

_________________
Merle
MOULagain KI#: 00049828

After seeing all those sketches, it kinda makes me worry how much content Cyan has thrown out, or given up on that had they had been designing for Uru.

_________________
KI#: 23102

I thought that "rock bonsai" looked familiar. Somebody incorporated it into a Fan Age called "Rell-too".

_________________
New to Uru? Check out this video.

KI numbers:
TOOO: 194360
SkydiverTOOO: 347569
The Other OTHER Operation: 354975
T000: 7051610
DJ TOOO: 5688425

Second Life: TOOO Fall

Cool! So Venalem may have been used by the Guild of Ink-makers perhaps?

It's saddening though that there were so many great ideas that were never realised.

_________________
URU blog | Archives of the Restoration

Zardoz wrote:

And now we know what Venalem would have looked like.

Ohhh!.. And an eight years old mystery is finally solved... I thought we would never know more about that sketch; this a really nice surprise.

That Venalem Age sound like a very interesting concept; it looks like it was the source of the Ink. Or at least part of it, because that seem to conflict a bit with what Gehn told in Riven regarding the golden beetles.

Well if it was an Ink Makers Age (speculation), then perhaps they were experimenting with different ink forms.

That one image of Kahlo looks like what I've been building with Rilahnohan >.<

_________________
Beneath - Journey of an explorer in D'ni
UruBlogs - Blogs from Uru Explorers
Inkwell - Age development Blog.