The Art of Halo 3: Prima Official Art Book

by Fernando Bueno, Shaida Boroumand

• Stunning layouts of hundreds of pieces of concept art from Halo 3 . Enter the creative world behind the smash hit video game.
• Commentary from Bungie artists on their vision of the world of Halo.
• Hardcover, square trim book to showcase the art in a classic, lasting format.

Genres: Art, Science Fiction

168 pages, Hardcover

First published November 25, 2008

About the author

Fernando Bueno is a project manager and digital producer at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. Previously, he served as editor-in-chief at Prima Games from March 2011 to August 2014, following seven months as a senior project manager and six years as an author. Over his career, he has written more than forty strategy guides and art books, including Metroid: Other M Premiere Edition, for which he also captured in-game screenshots.

Reviews

[Parka · Rating 5 out of 5]

(More pictures at parkablogs.com)

If you're awed by the fantastic visuals of Halo 3 on screen, this book will give you the concept art that were used to create them.

It is filled with concept art on the characters, vehicles, weapons and the environment. Each character comes with lots of design variations. Master Chief itself has 15 variations, all fully painted to the point I can't tell if they are 3D or digital paint. Some of the characters include ODSTs, Arbiter, Brutes, Flood and Strato Sentinel. At the end of the book, several pages are devoted to paintings of Master Chief.

The second and third chapter contains the war vehicles and weapons. There are lots of sketches and paintings. The really cool part is they have included lots of different rifles that weren't use in the game. The captions that appear throughout explain very briefly the ideas behind designs, same goes for all illustrations in the book.

The next section is the environment paintings. All look really fantastic and they printed them big. There are a few beat boards and storyboards but not much.

The last chapter is filled with random stuff. There are photos of miniatures, t-shirts, promotional items and toys.

The book itself is hardcover without any dust jacket with low gloss pages. The paper stock is not thick enough. The paper became wavy from the glorious art printed on it. Luckily, it doesn't affect the visual quality of the pictures in anyway.

This is a wonderful book to complement the game, highly recommended to all concept artists, game developers and fans of Halo 3. For the price, it's worth every cent.

This review was first published on parkablogs.com. There are more pictures and videos on my blog.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to describe this book - part concept art, part description of the creative process, part exhibition of what the artists on the Halo project were capable of. These sorts of book i love - i love the quality of the artwork created to show and idea or concept when there is every chance it would never see the light of day. I am a sucker for this kind of work and it just goes to prove that todays blockbuster games there as much creative processes involved as there are on the latest cinema blockbuster.