: I'd say it's painted—I've never seen filters that replicate impasto
: techniques like that (the brush strokes are also strongly angled in ways
: that wouldn't "make sense" for a computer generation). I suppose
: he could have applied an actual painting on top of a filtered Halo image
: but I'm leaning towards physical painting from a screenshot.

There was a program going around about a week ago on imgur from a Russian site that used algorithms to fuse the art style of one image with another in pretty impressive ways. It's how this Sonic drawing looks like a Van Gogh painting:

Seems an odd coincidence that this "painting" shows up on imgur at the exact same time that the program is making the rounds, and the guy even included HUD elements into the image. I say it's poppycock, but who knows for certain...