This was a CD/album cover that I made for the soundtrack to my webseries "Arby 'n' the Chief: Next Gen" using Source Filmmaker and Adobe Photoshop.
I debated whether or not to put this on here, but considering that a lot of people in my Discord server wanted a poster version of this, I figured what's the harm?
Source Filmmaker, while a great program, does have some limitations to its models. Namely in terms of the Halo spartans and elites at the bottom, the coloring is... a bit off compared to the actual Halo Reach models. The coloring for the spartans is frustrating since it uses "skins" to color them accurately, and I had to go into photoshop to repaint the elite textures manually to make it look more like the game. You'll see what I mean further down.
In terms of the spartans (since many have primary and secondary colors) I had to go in and take several different renders, switching the primary/secondary colors and turning the visibility of the background characters off and on.
I also had to make it a large render (in terms of the length and width of the renders) to make up for the fact that editing in SFM uses a 1920x1080 window to edit. So the renders came out to 9600x5400 (five times the size of your normal 1920x1080).
After all the renders were done, I took them all into photoshop and used a brush tool to paint over where the secondary colors were and weren't and also removing the parts of the three background characters under the other characters.
Then I put the photo in a 3600x3600 photoshop document, and edited the text to fit the retro-game style that the series likes to use for it's titles, which is the font Fixedsys Excelsior.
I also used other album covers for TV shows and movies for references.
Feet Before
Feet After
Backside Before
Backside After
Hands Before
Hands After
Above you can see an example of how the textures for Eugene (the yellow and peach colored elite) and Arbiter (the white and violet elite in the front) were manipulated colorwise. Since there's too many files, here is just some of the ones for Eugene.
After that, we use the $basetexture material replacement method for Arbiter and Eugene's 3D models in SFM and pose them for the camera.
Normal Primary/Secondaries for spartans and Clyde (the maroon elite officer in off to the right) render that need to be edited later.
Same as the first, but the three characters in the background are removed for stylistic choice later.
Primaries/Secondaries for spartans and Clyde are switched. Also, Lockdown's (the spartan with the skull) visor is removed to make up for the black tinted visor as seen in Halo: Reach later.
Like the first one, the background characters' visibility is turned off to make up for the stylistic choice later.
Masking Brush in Photoshop is used to paint in the primary and secondary colors for the spartans and Clyde as well as the three characters in the background. Lockdown's visor is also painted back in with a 50% opacity masking brush to give a look similar to Halo Reach's.
After some editing in Photoshop, we have a decent looking album cover!
