Hello and welcome everyone; I thought it would be a nice idea to create a thread dedicated to presenting tips, tricks and techniques for the Halo 4 forge. This would include anything from lining up objects, using the lighting system effectively, how to use the tools provided and more. I hope that everyone could help me by sharing your knowledge of your own tips and/or techniques by posting below. I endeavor to create a place anyone can come to learn some cool techniques to help them improve their forging skills. The most useful and important tips that you guys give me will be updated in the main post. I encourage you to use images/video where possible to help people understand your idea. Your name will be credited to any idea I use that you shared. Precision Movements: Spoiler Width/Depth Movement Select the object you want to make a precise edit on, move your camera so you are above the object looking down on it, when looking down on the object you move much slower therefore you can make much more precise edits to the object held. Height Movement Not the most accurate way to correct objects in small increments but can be effective, is selecting your object and very quickly pressing the right/left bumper followed by the a button (to release the object) will release the object mid-way through the height adjustment. From my experience if you do this as fast as possible it can do smaller than 1 degree adjustments. But it doesn't always turn out how you want. Another way of achieving a similar result is using the co-ordinate edit mode. Place the object where you want it then open up co-ordinate edit screen (B button -> edit co-ordinates). Place the object one degree higher or lower than where you want it, then use the height adjustment to adjust it up or down by one as soon as you make the adjustment immediately close the screen and release the object. Because the edit co-ordinates has an "ease" effect as it moves you can get the object the perfect height you want. Halo 3 style precision edits You can also use objects in fixed mode to line up other objects with your floor. Using a separate piece, an "adjustment piece" as I will call it. Say you have 2 block 4x4 lined up as a floor, but the next piece you are using doesn't line up perfectly using co-ordinates, creating a "bump" as you walk between the pieces (we will call this piece, "block1"). To fix this, place an 'adjustment piece' in fixed mode on top of the 'floor' (the adjustment piece will differ depending on the object you are lining up), so it is perfectly flat. Now release the 'adjustment piece', change it's mode to "phased" and move it off the edge of your 'floor' where you need the 'block1' lined up. Change the 'block1' to fixed mode and press it's face you want to use as the 'floor' against the underside of the 'adjustment piece' which will align the 'block1' almost perfectly flush to the 'floor'. You may need to use multiple 'adjustment pieces' if the object is large so it doesn't move around to much. If done correctly, you can line up pretty much anything 99% perfectly and have an unnoticeable "bump" effect. Magnets are your friend: Spoiler Symmetrical alignment on irregular angles So you have a piece placed at an odd angle and it can't be moved along the co-ordinates properly to easily line up for your symmetrical map? Here is a trick that might help: Once you have the object placed, duplicate the chosen object, turn magnets on and join the two together at the edges so they line up next to each other. Duplicate the object again and line it up again next to the newly placed object. You should now have 3 of chosen object next to each other. Take the middle object (the 1st duplicated) and join it to the edge of the 2nd object you duplicated. The idea is we are moving the piece across the map using magnets because it can't be done with hand-eye co-ordination or co-ordinate edit mode. Repeat until you have moved the object over to the other side of your symmetrical map. Now your piece should be perfectly inline! UberAURORA's Precision height with Magnets Move the piece that you want edited away from its current location (or duplicate for backup purposes). Remember its co-ordinate height. Once you have it away from everything else, duplicate the object. Then use co-ordinates to place the two objects end to end. From here, turn rotation snap off and rotate one object down or up a set amount of degrees and when your happy, let go of that object, turn magnets on then pick up the other object. What will happen is that your object will snap to the other piece but the piece your currently holding will be slightly higher or lower than the co-ordinate height depending on how much you rotated your duplicate piece. Once you're happy delete the duplicate piece, turn magnets off and then move it back to where you wanted it in your map. Map Callouts: Spoiler Impact skybox The impact skybox actually has two sides, one featuring a blue nebula and the other a orange/warm colour nebula. You can use these to your advantage when positioning team bases (red & blue base) to help people recognise where they are on your map. Landmarks Info coming soon... Colour Coding Info coming soon... Thanks for reading Note: Sorry if you don't understand some of these, i will add images asap.
I personally hate magnets. I use them to line up stuff at odd angles and whatnot but that's about it. Precision coordinates are much better.
Infinite explosion (no delay on spawning) I guess it can be something good to know when you make casual maps or minigames. Select an object, go to Advanced Options, go to Max Count and Min Count. The Max Count is the number of the same object in your map and change if you put or remove one of the object. If you change the Min Count to the same number of Max Count, all these objects will spawn immediatly after they had disappeared. So, if you put a lot of the same explosives somewhere on your map and do something to make one of the explosive explode at the beginning of the game, you will have a big explosion that never stop. You can use this trick for other objects (like vehicules or guns). I think many of the forgers know this trick, because it was also working on Halo 3 and Reach. You have to know that if the explosion if too big, it can easily make your map bug. Background sounds This is just something I realised. If you want to make a realistic map, maybe you want to put background explosion sounds, to make the players feel they are on a battlefield. In war games, there's often background sounds (shoots and explosions). If you want to add this kind of atmosphere to your map, just put a few vehicules with different spawning times far away from your map and above water (or above empty space on Impact), so that players, during a game, will hear sometime explosions far away of the map.
I like magnets, they are useful for lining up a flat floor very quickly without any bumps, and a few other small things like making walls. All depends on what i'm doing. The fact you don't need to use them makes them a good feature. Thanks for the input, this is a nice touch if you have the budget which most people would. I may add this later on.
I figured out another way to set objects to a precision height. Involving magnets. Simply pull the piece that you want at a fine tuned height away from where it currently is, remember its co-ordinate height. Once you have it away from everything else, duplicate the object. Then use co-ordinates to place the two objects end to end. From here, turn rotation snap off and rotate one object down or up a set amount of degrees and when your happy, let go of that object, turn magnets on then pick up the other object. What will happen is that your object will snap to the other piece but the piece your currently holding will be slightly higher or lower than the co-ordinate height. NOTE: The duplicate rotated piece you can change its height up or down to get more accurate in some cases. Delete the duplicate piece when done. From here once your happy with the height, let go of the piece, turn magnets off and then move it back to where you wanted it in your map. Make sure not to touch the bumpers and if you want to fine tune its position, just get above the object once again. NOTE: If you want additional objects around your object to be at the same height, you can either turn on magnets and use them in the same way to snap to that height and then let go, turn magnets off etc. Hope this helps people, I found it works quite well though tedious.
Never thought about doing that and its always the biggest problem in forging for me is height. Thanks for the tip!
Yes they are but I have noticed that they don't line up evenly all the time. I had to go and grab everything and select edit coordinates (not actually setting coordinates, just selecting) to line them up properly. It's useful to place them in the general area where you want them, but it definitely would be a good idea to at least go back and grab>edit coordinates to line them up right.
Thanks, this is a great trick, I will definitely add this into my post when I get a chance. I may re-word it slightly if I think it needs to be described a little better.
Yeah, I'm terrible at describing things. The only thing is this trick doesn't work for objects that don't have magnets. For example, extraction cylinders. It also works better on smaller objects than larger ones or rather it takes more trial and error with larger pieces. The first time I did this was with "station, corridors" on Impact. This trick does work for them its just a lot harder to get working than with a much smaller piece.