Halo II Anniversary

Halo II Anniversary is the one of biggest projects that Blur has done. We recreated 50 minutes of cinematics for the game. In the original Halo II, these cinematics were done in game with the real time engine. For the remake Microsoft wanted Blur to do them pre-rendered.

There were so many characters to create that we needed two character leads. My friend Mathieu Arnei and I were the leads. There were over 70 character assets that we needed to make for this show. On this show I supervised the creation of the alien characters (Covenant & Flood). Mathieu supervised the majority of the human characters (UNSC).

We mostly used off site freelancers as the character creation team. I supervised eight offsite and two in studio freelancers. It was challenging to work with an off site team. They were all talented artists but it was the first time many of them worked for Blur. As such they needed a lot of training in our pipeline. Also from a managerial stand point I think any supervisor would rather have the team in house to facilitate communication.

My job as lead was both artistic and technical. I did paint over notes on top of work in progress renders. I had almost daily online video conferences with the offsite team to give feedback and train them in whatever they were unfamiliar with. I also handled model ingestion and clean up from the off site team to make sure that their characters would work in our pipeline.

On this show Blur needed me to focus more on supervising than doing production work. However, I did manage to do a little bit of art. I did the head sculpt and facial hair for the Prophet characters. The textures for the Prophet heads were done by a freelancer. I also did some polishing on the head fur for the Brutes.

Character modeling on this show took place from January to July 2014. We used our standard tools: 3ds max, Zbrush, Mari and VRay to render.