Todd McFarlane Details the Making of Halo 3 Figures

Yes, Master Chief looks great, but this is how you make the Chief 5 full inches of pure unbridled awesome.

What does it take to create the incredible McFarlane Toys Halo 3 figures? Bungie interviewed Todd McFarlane about the process of making the figures. The interview was posted on the tenth, but Spawn.com just posted a news brief about it today. If you love what McFarlane has done with the Halo 3 figures, or are wondering about the processes of McFarlane Toys, it's a long, detailed, and fascinating read.

Todd goes into great detail on the licensing, conceptualizing, planning, picking what figures to make and deciding what armor variants to do when, articulation decisions, sculpting, modeling, Todd reviewing and approving the figure, paint applications, packaging, and the challenges of creating a figure. This is accompanied by some images of stages that Master Chief went through during his conceptualization for his 5 inches of ass-kickery. You also get a peak at some notes that Bungie made about a phase of the Master Chief sculpt.

Todd mentions a few interesting things about the figures you may not have known yet. One is that he talks about the Elites alongside the Spartans when discussing what armors to do and as army builders. So does this mean that series three will have some Elite army builders? That would be keen as hell. Something to look at for series two is that the packaging will be a little more tweaked than the series one packaging. Todd also mentions that he would like to do a more traditional McFarlane Toys take on the Halo characters, meaning larger scale figures in dynamic poses such as the Spawn figures of the past few years. Sure the articulation would be less and they figures may be more like statues, but I would love to see the "McFarlane" kinds of things they would do with Halo.

Near the end of the interview Bungie asks Todd about a future Recon Spartan, which he replies, "We already have Recon in the works (but it may not be easy to get)." That either means it'll be an exclusive somewhere or that the Recon Spartan will be the figure you get with the Halo points. The Halo points figure has yet to be revealed, so it's possible. As a joke, or maybe not a joke, Todd says "The real question is, do we have any plans to make a Mister Chief?" Damn, that'd be cool.

Read the full interview at Bungie.net.

- Shawn - 03/14/08