Hey there everyone, welcome to Halo Spotlight. The place where Halo community creations are put front and centre. In Fanart Features, we highlight artists and their creations.
In this fanart feature, we’re showing off amazing 3D artwork featuring some absolutely incredible models by Abimael Salazar, also known as AbiSV. AbiSV has made a large range of Halo related artwork, most recently ‘The Weapon’ from Halo Infinite.
AbiSV sent across 7 of their favourite pieces, along with some in depth detail on how the pieces were created and why. This is our most extensive Fanart Feature EVER, so be sure to give the pictures a look and the info a read. You won’t regret it. We’ll stop typing now, so enjoy the art and info below.
“This model is among some of my oldest projects, yet is definitely one of the most intricate meshes I’ve worked on. The Halo 3 ODST armour set is definitely my favourite armour design in all of the Halo franchise, back when I was a kid I remember playing The Ark and The Covenant for hours just because these characters showed up in those missions.
This was also one the first models where I did an HP-LP subdivisible workflow and started to delve into PBR materials and texturing. I remember spending hours taking a look at the in-game model and the cinematic props used on the promotional campaigns to gather as much info as I could.
My favourite feature being how the “forehead” of the helmet will appear to be bigger than what it actually is, due to the height and FOVof the players point of view as well as the graphical limitations at that time in terms of polygonal count.”
“The MK IV was certainly a big task to complete. I’ve always liked some features of it’s design but never felt like doing one, that was until a friend of mine asked me to do one for him. From the get go I knew it was going to be a laborious task, I’ve previously done a more stylized version of it for a fan game, but I was aware that most of the detail was absent.
Not only that but all the reference we could get were a few promotional renders and screencaps of the cinematics, most of them at odd angles and with all sorts of lighting making it difficult to grasp the details and proportions. Because of that, modelling the armour pieces was kind of a hassle, the techsuit, opposite from what I had, thought flowed quite nicely however. I also had a good time doing the texturing, while from up close it doesn’t necessarily look good in my opinion I was quite satisfied with how it looked from afar.”
“I went back to play the original trilogy on MCC and I became a fan of the classic Elite design. Not only was I already planning on doing the Halo 3 version, but I realised they had some elements in common, as is natural of the art style in between games. So I decided to think of a way to incorporate one into the other, keeping what elements they shared and redesigning what was unique to Halo 2.
At this point I had a clear image of what I wanted to do: “Keep all the design elements and features, while upgrading the graphical quality by defining a silhouette and adding just short of enough detail to not hurt the original design.” Thankfully for me, the game model had loads of details which I had previously not noticed, so most I had to do is resolve the shape and proportions and just follow the reference. In this project I also had the luck to collaborate with some art friends, which helped me do the concept art and animation, as well as give me loads of pointers and advice throughout the process.
My favourite part of the project was definitely the texture and material work, from the iridescent shine on the armour to the vein like organic details on the suit and the flowing plasma on the shield generators, I definitely had a blast trying to make it look as alien as I could!”
Halo Combat Evolved Master Chief (HD)
“After working on the elite I realized I could do something similar with another favourite of mine. I had previously modelled two different renditions of MKV, however looking back on them I noticed they weren’t necessarily accurate. Since I felt satisfied with the elite I did I decided to try and do the same process on the MKV design. Since this time the reference was even older (about 20 years old) I had to make a lot more choices when it came to how I wanted it to look.
While I followed the same principles I had a bit more liberties when It came to details. With a more angular/polygonal design a lot more thought had to be put into interpreting the silhouette of the armour. For the surface detail I had decided to add shallow lines on the green metallic areas, so that the original shapes would be present at a distance but you could still get some detail if looked from up close. On the neutral gray/black areas I used concept art from the great Eddie Smith as reference, knowing that the more muted colours would somewhat neutralize the visual noise. While I had loads of fun in the modelling process, my favourite part was definitely the texturing.
Since the beginning I had decided I wanted it to be a colourful one. I spent some time looking at the character model in game and took note of how the shaders highlighted some of the colours on the model’s surface, some friends had also given me headers as to what colours it should be. In the end I tried to capture the colours that I personally thought were unique to Halo CE, a mix of purple and blue highlights complemented by a deep shiny metallic green, perhaps not necessarily representative of the original MKV game asset but descriptive to the original game.”
“3D recreation of “ih-manual-04b” by Isaac Hannaford under his “Assorted roughs for Halo 3″ collection. A very iconic composition, made as an early concept for the manual and one of many people’s favourite concept pieces.”
A huge thank you to AbiSV wanting to take part in this piece and sending over such an incredible amount of information. If you’d like to see more from AbiSV, you can do so on their Twitter Account and Artstation Account.
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We also have weekly pieces over on Halo United, so be sure to go and check out their awesome site too. If you missed the last one, you can find it here.
Want to see your Halo content or creation on the site? Check out the post submissions section, which outlines what you’ll need to do to get your piece in front of the spotlight. That’s all for now folks, so I’ll see you all next time.