Susan Arendt
Culture

Painting Portraits in <cite>Halo 3</cite>

Although Halo 3‘s Forge tool was created to let players muck around with the game maps, clever gamers have been using it for more artistic purposes, like this self portrait. If you can’t see it immediately, just keep looking. Eventually the face should emerge, hovering above the sand. Flickr member Rit Dye figured that by […]

Halo3selfportrait_2
Although Halo 3's Forge tool was created to let players muck around with the game maps, clever gamers have been using it for more artistic purposes, like this self portrait.

If you can't see it immediately, just keep looking. Eventually the face should emerge, hovering above the sand. Flickr member Rit Dye figured that by using a player's perspective to his advantage, he would be able to create an image that would appear vertical and 3d, as opposed to simply lying flat on the ground:

It ended up working out pretty well. The tough thing was positioning the objects so that the face maintained the correct proportions. For example, the mouth is about 100 yards away from the eyes, but it looks proportionately correct. Once I had all the objects placed (which took a while) and had my viewing location marked, the objects converged together and made the image. The cool thing is that the image begins to break apart once the player starts moving in any direction.

Undeniably brilliant, and certainly puts a new wrinkle in the "videogames as art" discussion.

Halo 3 Forge: Illusion Self Portrait [Flickr, via Kotaku]