The Making of 581 - Part 3
As I mentioned at the end of part 2, we completed concept work in Oct of last year and began talking with David Dawson about modeling. David does amazing work. We gave him parameters and he immediately began modeling up the base ancilla. His work was excellent, but we wanted to more closely follow the game asset, so we had David remodel the game asset to ensure the base ancilla was correct. Here is the initial freehand work vs the game asset.
Once we had the base nailed down, David we quickly got all the armor in place and got a basic skin.
We initially planned to use 405th colors for 581, and played with various iterations of that idea.
While this was a very good look, I was still falling back to the Master Chief colors because that is how I had always envisioned the character. We moved from blues to greens.
This along with more tweaks and small changes, especially to the inner wing details and lateral armor plating, than David probably wants to remember resulted in our final ancilla look.
The last step was to create emotions for 581. This is much harder than it looks but we had already gone through the exercise with CJ so we had David apply them to the model:
As I am writing this, it all sounds simplistic and easy, but there was an unbelievable amount of back and forth, tweaking and retweaking minor details, especially between
Asgardianhammer and David. Both were patient through the whole process, even when we had to restart several areas. The end result speaks to that patience and dedication.
What are we doing now? We are having David go back and rework his model to be printable.
Accodirnng to HaloNation the ancilla's base size is Dimensions: 1' 11" x 1' 8"... almost 2ft across. Because that size is so unwieldy, we are looking at creating one that is 13.5" wide by 15", roughly 2/3 life-size. We would also like to offer keychains and some smaller, desktop sized versions as well. Time will tell.
