Obstacle Course – Research

The character I will be animating running through the obstacle course is none other than the famous Super soldier John, Spartan 117, otherwise known as the Master Chief from the Halo franchise.

I am personally a huge fan of the Halo franchise so this will be a bit of a passion project for me.

 

Halo 3 Live Action:

 

Halo 4 Prometheans Attack:

 

 

Halo 5 Locke Hunting Chief:

 

Mash up: (3:10 Ghost scene, 1:45 Jump)

 

Making Of:

 

Halo 5 Mountain Run:

 

Halo Legends Running Scene:

 

Halo 4 Teaser Trailer:

 

After Doing some research it’s quite clear that due to the use of performance capture the Chief is animated in a way that just about any athlete in a heavy suit would move, so I could also use videos of parkour, free running etc as reference too. Watching the making of for Halo 4, they wanted to make sure he moved like a machine, like a tank with feet. However, when it comes to combat Spartans can move extremely fast, and the Chief has been recorded to run over 100 Miles Per Hour. So what I’ve learned is that essentially Master Chief’s movement changes based on situation.

 

Fast, Agile, Almost Preemptive

Slow, Heavy, Bulky, Purposeful

 

Perhaps one of the most unique thing about Chief’s movement other than his bulkiness is his thrusters and movements in low gravity.

 

 

This might come back to bite me by being so ambitious, but i would like to have at least one section of the obstacle course in low gravity, looking at Halo 4 and 5 for reference but in particular the Halo 4 Teaser. I’d also really like to have the Chief jump from somewhere and land like he did in Halo 2.

 

The Course

Instantly I realized how awkward it might feel having this super soldier running through all these tightly positioned obstacles so I believe stretching out the course a little may be beneficial, however another way to solve this is to simply slow it down a bit. I’d also like to mix and match a few of the obstacles from both courses.

 

First  I’m going to analyse the courses for the basic movements within them and then I want to meet in the middle, then change the look a bit.

 

Concept for custom course:

 

Basic Pass of Key posses

 

If I could arrange for Steve to block out my course with just as basic geometry as the other two courses that would be a genuinely huge help, however I still have to check with him that this change is acceptable first.