Warrior Servant - Game Ready Character Model

Completed in March 2024, this is my version of a Forerunner Warrior servant from the Halo franchise. Forerunner Warrior Servants are the military forces of the ancient Forerunner empire seen in the Halo Franchise. This is just one of the many armor variants a warrior could have worn.

For this project, I wanted to create a game-ready hero character; the entire model has fewer than 60k tris. I plan on using this character for an Unreal Engine project I am currently working on. I also took some creative liberties compared to their appearance in the Halo Encyclopedia. I wanted to combine Halo 4's and Halo Infinite's Forerunner art styles. I basically designed the armor to fit into Halo Infinite, almost as if this character could be a boss enemy in the game.

For this character, I started by blocking out the silhouette of the armor in Blender, then transferred the block out into ZBrush to create details for the high-poly model. Then I took it into Maya for retopology, but Maya's quad draw didn't like this model for some reason making it tedious and time consuming, so I did what I could in Maya and finished the rest in Blender. Then I UV unwrapped it in Blender using UDIMs and exported the low and high-poly models into Substance Painter. Before going into Substance Painter, I went into Photoshop to create patterns that would be seen on the armor, such as hexagons and tech lines. In Substance Painter, I already had smart materials for my Forerunner characters, but I needed to change them to make them compatible with ACES LUT for Unreal Engine 5. My custom smart materials and my Photoshop patterns did most of the work, but I hand-painted some details, especially on the roughness channel. Then I took it back into Blender for rigging and rendering.

I also created some custom weapons for this character.

This model was inspired by 343 Industries' depiction of Warrior Servants in the Halo 4 terminals and the Halo Encyclopedia.