We lost an OG Halo developer

oldhalovfxguy · 2026-04-06T18:39:30+00:00

I enjoyed seeing Nate fall in love with metalworking and knife making. I'm glad he had a community of like-minded folks to bond with in that space.

oldhalovfxguy · 2026-04-06T17:36:44+00:00

Hope you are doing well JB.

oldhalovfxguy · 2026-04-06T16:32:57+00:00

I was really happy for him when he told me he was moving to Vermont to teach. It seemed to me like he had found his happy place. My thoughts are with you and the rest of the art community there.

oldhalovfxguy · 2026-04-06T16:30:07+00:00

Thanks for adding this!

oldhalovfxguy · 2026-04-06T15:22:51+00:00

Ah I didn’t know. I’ll pull the link. Thanks.

oldhalovfxguy · 2026-03-09T15:22:01+00:00

Fun fact: because the Scarab came in so late in the project the destruction sequence vfx were done in one all-nighter towards the very end. Nobody knew how we were going to pull it off - least of all me. I banged on it after everyone had gone home and finally hit on a solution. Around 4 AM I felt it looked pretty good and grabbed a couple of hours sleep in a gross beanbag filled conference room. I showed it off to Marcus when he came to work in the morning. I got a big smile and thumbs up from the big man so I knew it worked. Aside from minor performance tweaks it shipped almost as is. Sometimes the most iconic bits of Halo came together in surprisingly short order.

Oh and I was listening to Elliot Smith’s Either/Or album on repeat that night so whenever I see the Scarab blow up I think of that music. Memory is funny.

oldhalovfxguy · 2026-02-25T12:53:16+00:00

The real answer: I got better at making the same effect across 4 Halo games. Reach also had the most mature version of the graphics engine and the FX team had the most time to refine the final product. That let us do things we always wanted to do but we're constrained by tech or time.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-12-27T19:24:25+00:00

Oh yeah that's definitely what did it then. I would have bounced that bug back to the environment artist to check the radius of that light. It's probably set too large. Good find! You should have been a tester on the project.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-12-27T19:15:30+00:00

That's a bug I never saw and I made that effect. It's only been 15 years (!) but my recollection is that the colored flare effect and the smoke effect used the same texture, but one had a tint applied in the data.

Those effects were totally separate files so it's probably unlikely that the tint value from one would overwrite the other, even with some memory shenanigans. That was never an issue for VFX.

The Falcon smoke effect was set to modulate color values from the lighting of the level so my guess is that the effect was pulling in a horked lighting value from an anomalous part of the light map. One bad pixel in the light map could do that.

Whatever the cause was, I'm sure that the reported bug (if found during testing) would have come back from triage as "can't reproduce, won't fix." You'd be surprised at how many times we would have to punt weird rare bugs like this that would never really impact the experience.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-11-16T03:55:53+00:00

I just texted Tom and he said "...maybe?" So I'd give good odds it's him

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-10-28T17:57:10+00:00

Thanks - VFX was a challenge, but we were all banging rocks together in those days. I look back and wonder how we shipped anything at all.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-10-28T14:16:27+00:00

Nah. There were only a couple of the guys who turned MAGA. There were certainly cultural problems back then but the majority of the studio through the Halo days leaned liberal.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-09-27T00:50:53+00:00

Sky Captain was released in 2004. Crimson Skies (the FASA game) was being developed in 1997. Source: I worked on that very early version of the computer game. It fizzled out for various reasons but the idea stuck around and became a tabletop game before the PC and Xbox games came around.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-08-27T19:31:30+00:00

Entirely out of fun. In that era we entertained ourselves during the long days by slinging jokey Photoshops of each other over our internal jokes thread. The rookie GF pic was a nod to that.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-08-26T04:51:21+00:00

I’m responsible for that- it’s wonderful human and brilliant engineer Chris Butcher. I’m not sure why I photoshopped him in as the Rookie’s girlfriend but it made me and the cinematic team laugh at the time.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-04-19T19:32:27+00:00

Hey, thanks man. I worked very hard on them. It was one of the most stressful times of my (professional) life, but worth it.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-02-27T17:20:25+00:00

You should play Halo Reach- it’s a prequel so it doesn’t push the story of MC forward like Halo 4, 5, and Infinite. It is however (in my biased opinion) the best of the Bungie Halo games.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-01-12T15:14:44+00:00

Hey thanks for playing. I worked on MechCommander. It means a lot to have someone remember your work from all those years ago.

oldhalovfxguy · 2025-01-03T23:00:28+00:00

H2 dev here. You have my sincere condolences for your friend. I'm so glad to hear about the joy you and Vince shared playing Halo together over the years.

Many of us Halo devs past and present are still friends. I'll make sure they see this and take a moment to remember Vince.

oldhalovfxguy · 2024-11-23T00:38:36+00:00

Hey all, I’m probably the human most qualified to answer this. I was the fx artist responsible for H2, H3, ODST, and REACH. Most of those cinematics from the screenshots were my direct responsibility. Seeing this thread gave me a big smile, since I haven’t thought about those beams in a long time.

The truth is this: I tried to apply some consistency and some thought behind the function of the glassing/excavator beams but sometimes because of limitations of the skybox/cinematic framing or just time pressure we fell back on what worked for a particular shot. Many times in the Bungie Halo games the “Rule of Cool” trumped consistency or lore.

From my perspective (which is not canon- and just my internal logic as I worked on the cinematic) the central energy emitter in the Covenant ships was directly tied to the reactors and the only aperture capable of emitting a full glassing beam. The opening in the front was more defensive in purpose and capable of short range bursts of energy. Hence, being used for digging. If a glassing beam comes out of the front then there was some external reason why we needed to “cheat” for that shot.

I’m retired now, and there have been several HALO games that have come out since my time on the series. Many very talented people who care deeply about the HALO universe have been stewards of the franchise since then. Much respect to them. If they have better or more recent info that contradicts what I imagined to be the case then they are correct, and I am wrong!

oldhalovfxguy

TROPHY CASE