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.
Building on the original
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.”
Rendering a living character
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.”
Real fabric, real folds
To dress Lara believably, the team leaned on the real world. “Early on we decided to leverage a scanning pipeline,” Bengston says. “We sculpted the base body, got it 3D printed at real scale, sent it to a vendor, put real-world clothes on the mannequin, and scanned that. It gives us real-world cloth. Denim folds differently than silk. It folds differently from chiffon or cotton or wool.”
For one of Lara’s outfits, they went all the way. “We actually hired a tailor to create an actual outfit for her,” Bengston says. “They made it, we put it on a mannequin and scanned it, and now we have a real-world asset of the digital version.”
What we kept, what we reimagined
Technology renders the surface. Identity is what the team fought to protect. John Stafford, Narrative Director at Crystal Dynamics, frames the reimagining in three parts. “What we kept: Lara’s intelligence, fearlessness, and thrill-seeking spirit remain completely intact,” he says. “What we evolved: we deepened her emotional depth and relationships without losing her confidence. What we reimagined: we unified the mythic, grounded, and larger-than-life tones of multiple Tomb Raider eras into one Lara.”
It is a challenge the studio has faced before. “Anniversary was about retelling a classic through a modern lens. Legacy of Atlantis is about synthesizing thirty years of Lara into something new,” Stafford says. “Anniversary taught us that, outside of plot points, fans remember how Lara makes them feel. We want to evoke similar emotions from across all previous eras.”
That includes the younger, rawer Lara of the Survivor trilogy. “The Survivor era showed us Lara works well when danger has consequences,” Stafford says. “We carried forward her physicality, emotional credibility, and sense of earned resilience. Even at her most confident and badass, this Lara still feels human.”
One Lara, every era
The result is a Lara built to resonate with anyone who has ever picked up a controller in her name. For players meeting her for the first time, the target is simple. “That she’s the smartest person in the room, and the boldest,” Stafford says. “That adventure isn’t something she survives, it’s something she actively pursues.”
One quality, Stafford says, was non-negotiable no matter which era a fan loves most. “Lara’s curiosity and spirit of discovery. No matter the era, Lara must always feel like someone who needs to know what’s behind the next door.” Everything about how she is made has changed. What makes her Lara has not.
Source: PlayStation
