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Description
Fitting music: Triage at Dawn [Remix]

I've had some massive artist's block regarding what I was going to do for this year's annual April 14 Garry's Mod tradition. Since I've been doing a lot of Nintendo stuff for GMod recently, I decided to dial it back and go back to basics with Valve. Not even Team Fortress 2; I dialed it back even further to Half-Life. It was ten years ago, in 2008, when I was first formally introduced to that universe.

Last year was the final nail in the coffin for Half-Life 2: Episode 3, with Marc Laidaw (having left Valve) publishing a summary of how he visualized the plot would go. Since then, quite a few people have recreated "Epistle 3" in Source engine. Hopefully, someone will one day give it the Black Mesa treatment... and preferably not the Hunt Down The Freeman treatment.

But I wanted to go back to what some of us thought Episode 3 would be like back in 2007, when all we knew was that it would involve some ship from Aperture Science... tying directly into the newly-released Portal, which was stated to take place in the Half-Life canon. I certainly speculated that we'd see Gordon Freeman and Chell teaming up. Of course, Portal 2 retconned the original ending of Portal, so that's no longer likely. This is actually why I chose to the original Chell model here, with the idea of this being an alternate sequel to the first Portal game.

This is actually the second version of this picture. I spent a good portion of Wednesday working on the first version only to throw it all out on Thursday and start over again. While the first version actually does feature the titular Borealis and some nice atmosphere, my problem was that I was very dissatisfied with the composition of the picture, which had to be framed in a limited manner due to the incomplete nature of the Episode 2 Borealis model. It didn't feel very dynamic, and therefore it felt boring.

What I had originally envisioned was an exciting team-up between these characters. While I was at work on Thursday, I grabbed a sticky note and doodled a rough idea of what I actually wanted to see. Once I got home, I opened up GMod and translated my doodle into three posed ragdolls. One thing that was deliberately positioned was the combination of Gordon's left arm and the crowbar, to invoke the shape of the lowercase lambda, with the three central characters standing below it. And of course, I just had to put in the orange and blue contrast, with the HEV suit, Aperture jumpsuit, and gravity gun standing out in the blue background.

It's a shame that this will never see the light of day... but we can always sit back and fondly reminisce about what could have been.

Half-Life and Portal belong to Valve. Garry's Mod belongs to Facepunch.

Description
Fitting music: Triage at Dawn [Remix]

I've had some massive artist's block regarding what I was going to do for this year's annual April 14 Garry's Mod tradition. Since I've been doing a lot of Nintendo stuff for GMod recently, I decided to dial it back and go back to basics with Valve. Not even Team Fortress 2; I dialed it back even further to Half-Life. It was ten years ago, in 2008, when I was first formally introduced to that universe.

Last year was the final nail in the coffin for Half-Life 2: Episode 3, with Marc Laidaw (having left Valve) publishing a summary of how he visualized the plot would go. Since then, quite a few people have recreated "Epistle 3" in Source engine. Hopefully, someone will one day give it the Black Mesa treatment... and preferably not the Hunt Down The Freeman treatment.

But I wanted to go back to what some of us thought Episode 3 would be like back in 2007, when all we knew was that it would involve some ship from Aperture Science... tying directly into the newly-released Portal, which was stated to take place in the Half-Life canon. I certainly speculated that we'd see Gordon Freeman and Chell teaming up. Of course, Portal 2 retconned the original ending of Portal, so that's no longer likely. This is actually why I chose to the original Chell model here, with the idea of this being an alternate sequel to the first Portal game.

This is actually the second version of this picture. I spent a good portion of Wednesday working on the first version only to throw it all out on Thursday and start over again. While the first version actually does feature the titular Borealis and some nice atmosphere, my problem was that I was very dissatisfied with the composition of the picture, which had to be framed in a limited manner due to the incomplete nature of the Episode 2 Borealis model. It didn't feel very dynamic, and therefore it felt boring.

What I had originally envisioned was an exciting team-up between these characters. While I was at work on Thursday, I grabbed a sticky note and doodled a rough idea of what I actually wanted to see. Once I got home, I opened up GMod and translated my doodle into three posed ragdolls. One thing that was deliberately positioned was the combination of Gordon's left arm and the crowbar, to invoke the shape of the lowercase lambda, with the three central characters standing below it. And of course, I just had to put in the orange and blue contrast, with the HEV suit, Aperture jumpsuit, and gravity gun standing out in the blue background.

It's a shame that this will never see the light of day... but we can always sit back and fondly reminisce about what could have been.

Half-Life and Portal belong to Valve. Garry's Mod belongs to Facepunch.