Halo: Warfleet – An Illustrated Guide to the Spacecraft of Halo
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| Halo: Warfleet – An Illustrated Guide to the Spacecraft of Halo | |
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96 pages[5] |
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10 1/2" x 13 3/4"[5] |
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1.7 pounds (0.77 kg)[6] |
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Halo: Warfleet – An Illustrated Guide to the Spacecraft of Halo is a reference book on the Halo universe that was released on September 5, 2017.[5] The book details the technology, scale, design, construction, and variety of ships, space stations, and colony worlds in the Halo universe.[1][2]
Official summary[edit]
| “ | From the developers of the Halo video game franchise comes an official guide to the spacecrafts of the Halo universe, featuring intricately detailed cross-section illustrations.
This is the official, authoritative guide to the spacecrafts of the Halo universe, written in collaboration with 343 Industries, the developers of the “Halo” franchise. The full-color illustrated package covers the fleets of the UNSC, Covenant, and the Forerunner factions, featuring intricately detailed cross-section illustrations of franchise favorites the Pillar of Autumn, High Charity, and the Forerunner Dreadnought. Other specialized spreads offer a closer look at the weapons used in space, the planets of the Covenant and Human colonies, and the space-faring technology that each utilize. With illustrations from the Halo team and renowned illustrator Isaac Hannaford, this is a must-have for fans of the Halo franchise. |
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Content[edit]
Described as a more "technical" counterpart to Halo Mythos, Halo: Warfleet features ten full-color cross-sections of ships by Hans Jenssen, known for his work on Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections, and John Mullaney, who previously worked on ship cross-sections based on the Firefly franchise. In addition, multiple all-new secondary art pieces by various artists are included. Written by 343 Industries' internal writing team, with Kenneth Peters serving as writing lead, Warfleet also includes a variety of specific technical details and terminology formerly contained to the Halo Story Bible.[1][2]
The book is divided into five sections: Introduction/Technical Architecture, Human Ships, Covenant Ships, Forerunner Ships, as well as an expansive Glossary. The book is published in an "oversized" format to accommodate the detail in the larger illustrations. Each spread includes annotations to explain the functions of given parts of a ship, along with statistics and history of the vehicle in question.[1][2]
Development[edit]
Production on what would become Warfleet was originally inspired by classic technical manuals and tabletop RPG shipbuilding systems, evolving over time into a ship-recognition manual with cross-sections for spacecraft and related vehicles, before finally being approved for production as a cross section book. Production began in early 2015 (around the time of Halo: Fleet Battles' launch), with 343 initially seeking to bring on board artists Hans Jenssen and Richard Chasemore (both Star Wars cross-section alumni). However, Chasemore was unavailable due to other commitments, and as such the team were instead able to bring on John Mullaney.[7]
Longtime Halo fan and consultant Stephen Loftus was also brought on to assist in the project thanks to his expertise in Halo spacecraft, having previously produced detailed breakdowns of the various ships featured in the early games. This proved useful when translating in-game levels into a cross-section format, as in many cases the level geometry can not fit inside the ship (such as the infamous Warthog run on The Maw in Halo: Combat Evolved). Some abstractions were made with respect to the original layouts in order to make the designs make sense, and certain details were altered or ommitted as-needed. The process of looking in-depth at the preexisting designs also meant the writers had to consider details such as Ardent Prayer's lack of any kind of barracks for the troops, which was translated into written lore about how the Covenant live on the ship.[7]
From a canonical standpoint, Warfleet was a chance for the Franchise Team to establish what they consider to be the "definitive" designs for the spacecraft included, incorporating elements from across all of their prior depictions and including details that had been previously omitted from visual depictions. For example, while the Pillar of Autumn illustration was done based on the ship's Halo: Reach model, details were altered to align with written information from internal sources and the novels including the inclusion of the ship's previously-unvisualised M910 Rampart turrets and drop pod launch bays, and the removal of extraneous missile silos from the Reach asset. For some larger ships like UNSC Infinity the lack of detail proved less an issue as the sheer size of the vessel means that small details like point-defense guns are barely visible in the first place. In other cases, such as Blur Studio's assets, the weapons found on the ship models directly informed what was written as the loadouts. Some work was done to try and make sure details matched those from the novels, and weapons were measured to get accurate bore sizes, though in some cases details from the earlier novels had to be discarded for consistency.[7]
The writers of the book wrote up massive amounts of text for use within, mostly written before initial layouts and specs from the publisher. As such, much of this text was removed as the publishers gave their feedback, with Ken Peters claiming that "an order of magnitude" more text was written than published. Another issue faced by the writers was finding a good balance of information to include: enough to be interesting and valuable, but not so much as to lock in decisions for future projects. Likewise, some details were removed as they were too specific such as precise gigawatt outputs for given ship reactors, or may have given too much away about future plans. Overall around 2,000 words were cut including more technical information, details about manufacturers, keel lay dates, construction information, shakedown cruises, and lists of notable ships of a given class. This material remains within the internal wiki at the studio for reference in future projects.[7]
The opening of the book features a map of the Milky Way galaxy done by artist Darren Bacon. In early stages of production 343 wanted to include a star map showing the locations of various colony worlds across the galaxy, but due to publishing requirements for text contrast and sizing this proved infeasible. As such the final map is an extremely zoomed-out look at the Halo galaxy, and features a few labels that are inaccurately placed to ensure the map is readable.[7]
Halo: Warfleet was announced on the Halo website in an issue of the Halo Community Update on October 14, 2016.[1] On January 18, 2018, Jeff Easterling and Kenneth Peters promoted the book with a lore stream, discussing the book's development and providing more insight into some of the ships featured.[7]
Cross-section illustrations[edit]
The centrepiece cross-section illustrations for the book were done by artists Hans Jenssen (responsible for all of the UNSC starship cross-sections) and John Mullaney (responsible for the Covenant/Forerunner starships), veterans of similar work on other franchises including Alien, Firefly, and Star Wars. 343 Industries provided source material for the artists due to their unfamiliarity with the Halo series and steered the design process by providing a detailed style guide for the Halo art direction. They also provided 3D renders of ships and interior spaces for reference, particularly for the smaller ships with larger amounts of preexisting material to work with.[8] In some cases (such as the assets from Blur Studio's CGI cutscenes or the more modern games) the assets were useful, while in other cases the assets from older games were too low-fidelity to be useful. Additionally, in the case of some VFX assets, much of the final detail was not present in the models themselves but instead in detail texture maps only visible in their original renderers, with the models themselves comparatively undetailed. These issues combined contributed to a decision to draw all cross-sections from scratch rather than paintover 3D models.[7]
In the case of Ardent Prayer, the small size of the ship meant it the cutaways were already decided beforehand. For the Truth and Reconciliation, it was noted that there were several iterations of the bridge submitted, but these were removed as it was difficult to be certain where the bridge was located on the vessel due to the varying in-game level layouts. Mullaney noted that the larger the vessel the less precise locations of gameplay needed to be as it would be barely possible to identify human scale, and this was the case with High Charity.[8]
The illustrations created were a hybrid of traditional drawings and digital techniques. The drawings were done in three stages, consisting of an initial exploratory step consisting of simple line drawings to establish viewing angles, interior designs, and variations, before refinement and clean ink linework to finalise details. These were then followed by colours consisting of both hand painting and digital ink.[7] Glowing neon lights that adorned the alien vessels were achieved by adding bold vector lines to the pixels of the high resolution scans of the paintings. For the Truth and Reconciliation and Ardent Prayer illustrations, both vessels are adorned with an intricate but subtle hexagonal pattern. This was achieved by using Cinema 4D to create a delicate hexagonal mesh that wrapped around the hulls and and then composite the isolated render onto the scans of the paintings.[8] Truth and Reconciliation proved contentious during production due to the massive variance in looks for battlecruisers across the series, with hull colours ranging from white-silver to purple or even darker. As such, the final design was illustrated in blue.[7]
The team also explored doing illustrated backgrounds during production, though ultimately elected for a more "boring" white page background to keep the book feeling like a technical manual and to reduce the time required for production.[7]
Towards the end of production, artwork from both artists were given a final pass by Jenssen to ensure a unified art style across the entire book.[7] The massive amount of time required to produce such detailed pieces meant that only ten could be produced in total, with final artwork coming in just before the publishing deadline.[7]
Hans Jenssen produced several early exploratory sketches in early 2016 to explore what ships and viewing angles may be suitable for the book. Initial pencils were done for Pillar of Autumn in February and the finals in March, proceeding throughout the next months until July to produce a more detailed illustration that could be used for labels and layout. Jenssen included his own labels on these early drafts, with 343 then providing feedback and alterations as required. The final painting was then scanned for use digitally and given final edits, including the addition of a turret that had been accidentally ommitted from the original linework, and was finished in February 2017.[7]
Mullaney noted that the work on Halo was a departure from his prior experience due to the massive size of spacecraft in the Halo setting-often measured in kilometres. This was particularly the case for High Charity and Anodyne Spirit, with the latter having a "spindly" and "spikey" Forerunner aesthetic that requires intracate detailing. As a result this limited the amount of the interior that could be shown.[8] According to Peters, High Charity proved the trickiest illustration to nail down due to the sheer size of the station, even for Jenssen (who had previously drawn the similarly-massive Death Star for Star Wars).[7]
Conveying scale on the Spirit was also achieved by doing a separate vignette of the capsules of the cylixes, that were of a scale comparable to that of a human, which allowed him to convey human scale to the overall size of the vessel. Furthermore the sense of scale can be taken further as Mullaney explained that the Spirit rests at the city located at the top of the High Charity illustration, allowing the viewer to appreciate the sense of size of the great city in comparison to the Forerunner vessel. For High Charity, a vast amount of the city-station had never been visualised, and therefore it went through multiple preliminary approval stages until the design fell into place with 343's vision. Mullaney also noted that he used 3D interior modelling for the concentric ring that makes up the centre of the city.[8]
Other artwork[edit]
Aside from the cross-sections, Warfleet features a number of new original art pieces created by artists from 343 Industries, Spartan Games, and others (including new artwork by former-Bungie artist Isaac Hannaford). The book features a number of "secondary" spreads highlighting more ships and vehicles, originally conceived as supplementary to the illustrations but later on increased in number as the illustrations took form, eventually becoming full spreads in their own right. These pages feature renders of 3D assets from other Halo projects, with the art done by 343's in-house artist/producer Carlos Naranjo.[7] 3D assets used include:
- Axis Studios' 3D assets from Spartan Ops (Autumn-class heavy cruiser, Strident-class heavy frigate and Zanar-pattern light cruiser)
- Blur Studio's 3D assets from Halo Wars and Halo 2: Anniversary (D77 Pelican, M8823 drop pod, and Sojourner-class dreadnought)
- Spartan Games 3D assets from Halo: Fleet Battles (Epoch-class heavy carrier, Halberd-class light destroyer, Sinaris-pattern heavy destroyer, Varric-pattern heavy cruiser)
- 343 Industries' internal 3D assets from Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians (F-41 Broadsword, M12B Warthog, Kmiro'sish-pattern Lich, Phaeton, Guardian Custode, Mantle's Approach, and Hekar Taa-pattern blockade runner)
Appearances[edit]
Trivia[edit]
- The Halcyon-class light cruiser on the book's cover is based on the original depiction of the class seen in Halo: Combat Evolved (including the Marathon logo on the port side) rather than the updated model seen in Halo: Reach and later media.[9]
- On the pages describing the UNSC Infinity, the M820 Scorpion is erroneously referred to as the M850 Grizzly.
- The D77 Pelican is erroneously described as having a tandem cockpit configuration, despite then being described as side by side in the following sentence.
Gallery[edit]
Concept and early art[edit]
An earlier version of the book's cover.
DAS-class storm cutter render
Gladius-class corvette render
Early version of the Gladius-class corvette.
Unfinished Pillar of Autumn art used on pages 24–25.
Early concept art by Isaac Hannaford for the slipspace drives featured in the book.
Pre-release pages[edit]
An early version of the Cairo Station page.
An early version of the Phaeton page.
An early version of the Pillar of Autumn page.
Final art[edit]
The book's full cover illustration.
The table of contents. Pages 4–5
Infinity repaired over Earth, by Darren Bacon. Used on pages 4–5
Monitor diagram used on Pages 6–7
A human slipspace drive render, by Isaac Hannaford. Used on page 10-11
A Covenant slipspace drive render, by Isaac Hannaford. Used on page 10-11
A Forerunner slipspace drive render, by Isaac Hannaford. Used on page 10-11
The Milky Way galaxy by Darren Bacon. Used on page 12–13.
An ancient human cruiser, by Isaac Hannaford. Used on pages 14–15
A Longsword with its weaponry, by Isaac Hannaford. Used on pages 16–17
The image of DAS-class storm cutters battling a Gladius-class corvette, by Isaac Hannaford. Used on pages 18–19
Pages 20–21
Pillar of Autumn cross section.
Cairo Station art used on pages 30–31
In Amber Clad art used on pages 36–37
Infinity art used on pages 42–43
Pages 42–43
Spirit of Fire art used on pages 48–49
High Charity art used on pages 56–57.
Truth and Reconciliation art used on pages 62–63
Pages 80–81
A cutaway illustration of the Ardent Prayer. Used on pages 76–77
A cutaway illustration of the Shadow of intent.
A cutaway illustration of Anodyne Spirit, used on pages 84–85.
A cutaway illustration of Anodyne Spirit's core, used on pages 84–85.
Sources[edit]
- ^ a b c d e f g h Halo Waypoint, Community Update - Into the Storm (Retrieved on Mar 19, 2017) [archive]
- ^ a b c d e f g Halo Waypoint, Community Update - Rockin' & Railin' (Retrieved on Sep 23, 2018) [archive]
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Halo: Warfleet, page 96
- ^ Spartan Games Community, Halo: Warfleet (Retrieved on Nov 4, 2016)
- ^ a b c d Bloomsbury, Halo Warfleet (Retrieved on Aug 14, 2022) [archive]
- ^ Amazon, Halo Warfleet (Retrieved on Feb 18, 2026) [archive]
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p YouTube - Halo, An Inside Look at Halo: Warfleet – A Guide to the Spacecraft of Halo (Retrieved on Feb 18, 2026)
- ^ a b c d e Reddit, Halo Warfleet Q&A with illustrator John Mullaney (Retrieved on Mar 30, 2022) [archive]
- ^ UNSC Pillar of Autumn model from Halo: Combat Evolved
External links[edit]
- An Inside Look at Halo: Warfleet – A Guide to the Spacecraft of Halo - A stream conducted by 343 Industries about the book.
- Halo Covenant Cutaway Art | Time-lapse by John R. Mullaney - a timelapse of the Covenant cross-section illustrations.
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