HALO ODST: CONTACT

"The Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODST) are a special operations capable organization of the UNSC Marine Corps that specialize in orbital-dropped shock infantry and special warfare tactics."

I owe a lot to the Halo franchise. I started learning Adobe products so I could make Halo Machinimas in the mid 2000s. Which in turn led to a career in the motion design/VFX industry. Even before I owned an Xbox I remember being enthralled by the colorful designs of Halo's world. This CG short is my love-letter to Halo.

> > PROCESS < <

The majority of the project was assembled/animated inside Blender and then exported to Cinema4D/Redshift for rendering. I used Blender to model/UV the ODST's armor and MA5K Assault Rifle (which is based on a design by Kieren Xiang). The Flood Head was sculpted in Zbrush and based upon Halo 2A concept art. The environment (Hallway, Hangar, Pods) was designed and modeled by Alex Quintin inside Maya.

The blood splatter and arm ripping simulations were done using Houdini 19 using Vellum and Flip. Seiji Anderson created a "goop" setup for the blood tendrils on the tentacles. All the rendering was done utilizing Redshift and then composited with Nuke Non-Commercial, which I learned specifically for this project. The motion graphics for the HUDs and end titles were animated in After Effects. Finally, editing was done inside DaVinci Resolve 18.

Inside Blender I utilized many addons like Animation Layers and Machin3Tools. Which make Blender's workflow far more efficient. I used Mixamo animations as a base and then tweaked with animation layers.

This was my first project in Nuke. My friend, Cris Scubli, helped me navigate the workflow properly. Muzzle flashes downloaded from ActionVFX.

I drew some very rough storyboards at the beginning of the project. I found it more useful to just dive right in although I stayed pretty close to what I had envisioned in the boards.

> > CHANGING DIRECTIONS < <

I actually started with a different story in mind. It was originally going to be a simple drop sequence for the ODSTs. As you can see below I went pretty far down that path. However, after seeing Alex's excellently-crafted environment I felt we needed to spend more time in it. I also wanted to pay homage to films like The Thing, Aliens, and artists like Oleg Vdovenko. Overall I think the direction I went in was far more interesting.

Workflow-wise I had started with Octane Blender but decided to go with Redshift as I've relied on it heavily before in commercial work. Still, I was very impressed by the quality and ease of use with the Blender/Octane workflow.