In honour of its 10th anniversary, I set about creating these laser-etched 3D crystal keyrings of the main dagger from Riven: The Sequel to Myst. This took more effort than you would think. I didn't want to just recreate the object myself and risk having any of the proportions incorrect, so I extracted the model directly from Myst V: End of Ages. However, the files encrypted (but that's already been broken by someone else), the file format had not yet been completely documented by other fans/hackers and so not only were there no programs to convert the data, but the documentation isn't even complete as to what each part of the file does so it required some trial-and-error. I spent around three weeks writing an extraction program, then spent the next two weeks cleaning up the model and preparing it for use in the crystal - welding all vertices, repositioning some edges to show up better, recreating the dagger's tip from scratch, etc... Next up, instead of just doing a grid-based point export, I set about writing a point dithering program to provide better-than-normal resolution as well as rough colourising on the handle. This isn't something that 3D laser etching companies usually do, but I found a company that was willing to do it for me. After sending the 3D model and a rather lot of money their way, a few weeks later a box arrived at my doorstep, filled with a few dozen of these very high quality 3D laser-etched crystal keyrings of a Riven Moiety Dagger. I estimate that all-up I spent around 110 hours on these, spread over 3 months.


Be sure to check out some more photos of these same keyrings here, here and here.