I don't know why but people just make everything this weird purple texture thats the same every time to make it "covenant", it doesn't even look good, does anyone else see this a lot?
its not much, just wanna share

Personally I don't understand the purple AT ALL, but I guess if the covenant like to dye their metals than that's cool... and makes... perfectly good... um... sense. :/

Maybe it has some religious significance.

Oh boy this thread again. Time for aspies to aspie about every goddamn thing in the halo series.

Maybe it's a weird alloy that's naturally purple o_O

That's what I always thought.

I guess that could be true. Still I do have to agree with this guy here a bit. I think people just don't think about more natural colors ever in their covie and they should. A decent mixture of both is okay, and also, blue and green are good but this bright blue and bright green stuff looks like crap too. People need to understand that this stuff should look slightly tinted these colors, then use good cubemaps and reflection alphas more to get the saturation they want.

If you've read the Halo Art book, they specifically said that the covenant was purple because:

1. If defined the color of covenant architecture from human and forerunner.

and 2. It was a stereotype, like someone had said above.

I don't see why its so bad?

Alien is stereotypically Red-Purple or Purple. Or platinum with some green.

Here we go; i spoke with an avid reader of the Halo-novels the other day and we ran into the same question: Why is everything covenant related purple(or shades of)? His answer was that the covenant literally "grow their ships" and equipment meaning that if its a bio ship and since your seeing the inside of it; it should resemble the colors of internal organs. This theory also means that the "engineers" are either the ships' cells or some sort of catalyst for making the ship self repair.

The 'Engineers' are leftover surviving biological supercomputers which were built by the Forerunners. They were enslaved by the covenant, but never supported them. They knew the truth about the Forerunners. Also, I believe that the purple is just a common colour for useful alloys that are used for most covenant tech. It could also be a reference to the captured Forerunner Keyship on High Charity, because the Covenant worshipped the Forerunners, and the one ship they had, on the inside, which was full of useful technology, was purple. Look it up.

He's not asking why the Covenant have purple metal textures...

I'd assume he's complaining about people who throw a purple texture onto any model and say that automatically makes it "Covenant" styled. It'd be just like making human architecture, putting Forerunner textures on it, and calling it Forerunner style.
Edited by Teltaur on Jun 3, 2011 at 01:32 PM

it is purple to make it more alien and foreign to us, because we do not have purple metal.

Or a multi-shiny/glossy-green colored one either.
Edited by spartan314 on Jun 3, 2011 at 07:32 PM

This is the point of thread, yeah.
But the overall covie metal discussion isn't too off-topic, so I'll continue it.

You know how our metals are mostly grey? Maybe purple metal is abundant to the covies. We don't know what element/alloys they're using, but hey, it could be fictional. So stuff could just be on the other side of the spectrum for them.

I'm going to say bungie probably came up with purple being the covenant's color because the human's military is green, and purple is not only opposite to green on the color wheel but also looks fairly alien

my guess anyway, however if you've noticed blue is also an increasing color for covenant, almost as common as purple in reach, and red also began popping up in bungie's later games (ex: revenant and aa wraiths)

purple is a man's color thats why.

I think it's because elite blood is purple, and elites are the backbone of the covanent military.

you know where I've found the reds swarming? Elite armour. In the other games, there was only 1 red rank, Major. In Halo Reach, there's... the red/maroon Majors, the brown/maroon SpecOps (ahem stealth elites), the maroon Zealots AND Field Marshials. Not to mention Ultra armour has noticable red deco.
Edited by IcePhoenix on Jun 4, 2011 at 02:28 AM

Regular metal...

from space.

Because modelling covenant stuff is hard, so people fall back on textures to get the look they desire. Unfortunately there are only 3 or 4 stock tiling covenant textures, so that's why you see that dark purple one a lot.

This and it's mainly used in a lot of other situations as well to mask a lack of detail when it's really obvious since Halo CE does not support normals.

Well historically looking back at the ancient Romans, purple was a color that represented high class. In the Roman senate, the two most important people, the consuls wore a purple band on their togas. In the middle Ages, it represented royalty, because only royalty could wear. Purple, the reason is because purple dye was very expensive back then.

Perhaps Bungie looked at the historical significance of purple as a symbol of high status tohave the Covenant be all like: "We build in purple because we are the great crusaders for the Great Journey." And besides, purple looks cool and most other games don't use purple.