: Shortly before Halofest (2011) I posted an earlier iteration of this under a
: former username. 2 years later, I'm back with another progress update. I
: also posted this on the Halo subreddit, where it got a good bit of
: attention. #egostroke

: What you all came here to see

: Storytime!

: I really like Sketchup. I'm also pretty handy with the program and I've
: always wanted to model the city to see how the Halo 2 geography and the
: ODST geography line up. 4 years later, it turns out, they line up pretty
: well.

: The render settings I've used hide a lot of the detail. The poly count is
: around the 2.4 million mark at this point. Luckily Google put a lot of
: time into developing Sketchup before they sold it to Trimble, which was
: quite buggy and unstable 4 years ago when I started the model and couldn't
: possibly have handled the model in it's current state.

: Unfortunately because of the way sketchup works, it will be an even more
: massive undertaking to texture this model than to build it. And I don't
: have the know-how to do much of any use with it. Not that it would be much
: use. The street layout while mostly contiguous at a local level, doesn't
: flow from one area to another, and the geometry is really blocky at ground
: level.

: After the important massout is done, I'd like to crowdsource more buildtime
: for the outskirts areas.
: A lot of references were used to make this. I drew geometry directly from
: layouts of the in game maps and superimposed them onto a real life terrain
: model from Google maps. Everything was built up around that. All the
: multiplayer maps set in Mombasa are in the model at a pretty high level of
: detail.

: Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed!

That's very ambitious! Love it! I am working on something similar using actual building geometry from the games, but it's woefully incomplete. I was also trying to reconcile the Halo 2 version of the city with ODST. I see where a lot of similarities lie as well. I'm also trying to incorporate where Headlong, District, Turf, Longshore, etc., can fit in. My ultimate goal was to provide a nice 2D annotated map of the city like a map you'd buy at a tourism board.

I was wondering if I should portray the animal park in its complete form or still in its under construction form as we see in the game. Should be 3 complete circles.

There's also a discrepancy in the miniature city used in the Halo 2 menu screen versus the final full-size in game city. That's a trick to reconcile as well.