IP built in Mirva
A sci-fantasy world. One blue-sky session, then six weeks with one artist.
The premise
An ancient institute of explorers charts a planet it can never finish mapping, and fights over what to do with everything it finds.
The planet at the heart of LENS is orders of magnitude larger than Earth. After centuries of expeditions, only a fraction of it has ever been mapped.
At the center of it all sits an ancient institute of explorers: part library, part laboratory, part marketplace.
Every region evolved on its own: new biomes, new species, new civilizations and new dangers, always just waiting behind the horizon.
To keep it running, it sends crews into the unknown. Not all of them play fair.
The Institute
Why this world keeps generating stories
Knowledge versus commerce isn’t a subplot. It’s baked into the crew, the Institute, and the world itself.
Sevan wants truth. Vaya wants the Institute funded. Neither is wrong.
An old guard of purists against a pragmatic, increasingly dominant commercial faction.
The Institute depends on the traders circling it. The traders depend on what only the Institute can find.
Every expedition raises the same question again: discover, or exploit?
The crew
The true believer
Humanoid · non-human · age unreadable
Quietly obsessive. Calm on the surface, with a bottomless intensity underneath.
A total commitment to truth above all else. Beneath the scholarly robes and accumulated optical equipment is a practical tinkerer, and decades of field experience.
When his values are threatened, the stillness doesn’t break. It simply becomes something else.
The charming operator
Humanoid · non-human · warm & expressive
The person everyone in a room gravitates toward, without quite knowing why. Genuinely devoted to the Institute, with her own theory of how to protect it.
A lovable rogue: small amounts of treasure have a way of finding their way into her possession. Everyone suspects. Nobody can quite prove it.
Her warmth is real. She just always knows exactly which truth to lead with.
The wildcard
Non-humanoid · symbiotic tech and biology
The only member of their species anyone in the Institute has ever encountered.
Communicates through a speaker device, in a perfectly measured, incongruous Oxford English voice.
Their rituals look like superstition from the outside. They have a logic of their own, and it’s usually right.
Ancient, self-sufficient, and quietly carrying knowledge nobody else on the crew has access to.
The world · Field records
Mountain-roofed city, partly inhabited.
Note Source of dynamic crystal.
Only reachable through air, riding the Gravity Tides. Dangerous location.
Note Locals maintain a vault of gravity manipulation science.
Open grassland, overgrown spires. Surveyed and mapped.
Note No permanent settlements. Grazing herds move with the season.
Bridge-villages strung between bamboo trunks, hundreds of meters above the forest floor.
Note Friendly. Trade in dried herbs and resin. No use for Institute currency.
The world · Vessels
Crew of 8, provisioned for four months.
Runs between the barque and the ground. Carries surveyors down to a site and lifts them out again.
A single-seat wind runner for open flats. Fast, cheap, and carries nothing but the rider and a backpack.
Creatures · Catalogued
Silhouettes shown for scale. Thousands of species remain to be discovered.
Process · Drawn by hand
Every canvas below was drawn on in Mirva: 19,880 strokes by the lead artist, 25,547 by the team, most of theirs in the two-day blue-sky kick-off. Many never made it into a final image: these are the paths not taken. Block-outs in Blender and sketches made elsewhere come on top.
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104 brush strokesThe 77 most-worked canvases, with the strokes drawn on each.
Process · Skills & lore
A skill is a way of working the artist writes once and Mirva applies every time. Lore keeps characters and places on model. LENS ran on about twenty of them. Every pair below is a real input and what came back.
A rough figure sketch in, a finished painterly character out — pose and proportions untouched.
Rendered with FLUX.2 [pro]
The artist’s rendering style, written once: flat facets of color, decisive light, crisp rim lighting.
Rendered with Nano Banana Pro
Turns a grey block-out into a lit, painted location, keeping its layout.
Rendered with Nano Banana Pro
Takes an ink drawing to a full render without redesigning it.
Rendered with Nano Banana Pro
Pushes a color sketch to a cinematic key frame.
Rendered with Nano Banana Pro
Sevan’s look, written down: goggles, headpiece, layered robes. Any sketch of him comes back on model.
Rendered with Nano Banana Pro
A character doc that turns a loose gesture drawing into the right person.
Rendered with Nano Banana Pro
The crew’s lore: drop a location in and Mirva places the right characters in it.
Rendered with Nano Banana Pro
Process · How this was made
By handSilhouette exploration by hand. Nothing is generated at this stage.
By handRefinement and detail, still drawn by hand.
Mirva2D generation in Mirva.
By handCorrections and overpaint by hand. Most images went round this loop several times.
MirvaA 3D mesh is generated from several angles of the character, then rigged to guide the pose.
By handA quick sculpt in VR and Blender.
MirvaGeneration with the 3D blockout as the source.
MirvaA 3D object generated in Mirva, then adjusted and rigged in Blender for full control over poses.
Mirva2D generation on top of the rigged 3D model.
Generations per model across the 73 sessions behind LENS.
LENS · World bible
A world bible. LENS was built as a demonstration of workflow, not as a property in development. The world is real work; the purpose was to find out how much of it one person could carry after a single team session, and how fast.
Six weeks, from a blank page to this document. It opened with a blue-sky session in Mirva: the lead artist with a few team members standing in as character artist, environment artist and logo designer. From there one senior concept artist, twenty years across games, film and animation, carried it alone.
Mirva does not design anything. Every composition, character and location was drawn, blocked out in Blender or collaged by hand first, then developed and corrected by hand throughout. It changes execution time, not authorship.
