Monthly Archives: January 2013

Custom UNSC Broadsword made of Mega Bloks!

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My friend “Goodwill Hunter” (whom I’ve previously interviewed on the blog), has posted a brilliant custom UNSC Broadsword over on SpartanBloks. I highly recommend checking out the thread for more pic of this great custom.

Now hopefully Mega Bloks will take notice and make the Broadsword a reality as a building set. (Hmm, maybe news at this year’s New York Toy Fair???)

-Sal

Color me this #3 Brute Warrior Concept!

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This one might take a little more time, but wow I see some great possibilities coming from this drawing.

Here is a Brute Warrior Concept:

There’s a good bit of detail in here even without shading. Have at it folks and remember you can submit your colorized versions to sal@halofanforlife.com and I’ll get them posted in this article asap.

UPDATE Here’s what I came up with. This took me a little longer than previous drawings. I put about 30 minutes into this one.

2nd UPDATE I though it would be neat to show how I came up with this. Below I show you the steps I took to make the above colorization.

Starting with the top left going right: Original scanned sketch; Base colors added; the sketch “multiplied” in Photoshop over top of it. While adding color, I actually have the sketch visible and “paint” the colors on a layer below it.

Second row left to right: Shadows; shown with base color; shown with sketch. Again, the sketch is always present so I know where to color in shadows as needed. This just shows you the layer of the shadows more clearly.

Bottom Row left to right: Highlights (they were too light to show by themselves so I showed them on the base colors; with the sketch added; and the FINAL with Base colors, shadows and highlights all together.

The “highlight” layer has the layer effect of “lighten at 25% fill,” while the shadow layer has the layer effect of “multiply at 50% fill.” If I didn’t add those layer effects the shadows would be too dark and the highlights too light. By altering there “fill” transparency, I can effectively show just the amount of shadow and highlight I want without having to change colors. And it also helps to blend the base colors with the shadows and highlights.

As you can see, you can actually be a bit rough in your colorization when using Photoshop. Using layers and layer effects can go a long way with cleaning up the roughness of colorization.

-Sal

Spartan Ops mission by mission enemy chart!

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While I am working on the rest of the Spartan Ops mission by mission articles, I wanted to give you folks a chart in the meantime that shows the enemies per mission.

Bear in mind that with suicide grunts, totals may vary. As well, with watchers reviving knights, those totals may vary slightly.

A friend of mine shot me a link to these totals and I cross referenced them with my own stats. I fixed a couple (lining up to my stats) and came up with this chart.

Here’s the chart and a little explanation of the colors after.

If you want to see this supersized, click and save or open in a new window.

I split up high Covenant kills and Forerunner kills as blue and red respectively. Solid red and blue denotes the mission with the highest count of that particular enemy, lighter filled boxes denote high counts of that enemy, but not the highest.

Note mission 3-4 has the highest concentration of highest kills counts for Covenant in most categories as does 5-1 for Forerunner enemies. These two missions I highly recommend playing over and over again if you want to get the majority of enemy commendations up in Spartan Ops. Then pick and choose from the other missions to finish up on enemies for commendations. I completed the Covenant Destroyer commendation last night and was rewarded with VERY COOL emblem!

The bigger triangle in the background of the emblem is the standard triangle, while the rest is the awarded emblem.

Feel free to download this chart. If you repost or link to it, please give me credit as “chart designed by Sal at HaloFanforLife.com”

-Sal

Halo 4 War Games weekly challenges: 1-14/20-13

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Campaign challenges will take some time. Those added skulls, plus the difficulty level are going to make these more of a challenge.

Spartan Ops challenges are easy. You can easily get the Elite and Hunter challenges by repeated play of mission 3-4. With there being at least a dozen or better Hunters on that level as well as many elites (including those in the banshees), those two challenges will be easy AND a blast to get! You’ll rack up some grunt kills along the way by playing that mission. Once you’ve finished the Elite and Hunter challenges, switch over to mission 5-4 as you can easily rack up 90 grunt kills in one match. (Look for a chart of enemies per mission later today that breaks down how many of each enemy per missions of Spartan Ops episodes 1-5!)

Whew, the War Games challenges…Okay, the secondary might be doable. But wow 45 WINS of CTF in one week? That’s just over 6 wins a day EVERY day for those week. It’s possible, by likely you won’t be playing much of anything else then. I LOVE CTF mind you, but not enough to devote a complete week of gaming to it.

The final Infinity Challenge is 250 Precision Loadout weapon kills. That is definitely easy enough.

Well there you are. You missions for the week, should you accept them.

-Sal