So I was forging and I phased a 2x2 ramp into the right cliff face of the quarry (if you look in from ocean) and it turned black. I noticed a similar change with a double wall and less extreme with a single wall. Does anyone know why tjis happens and why (related) sometimes objects are entirely different shades? ie. if one piece in shadow is connected to one in sunlight, even the parts of the shadow piece that are in the sun are dark
its a lighting thing - I just posted about this, only mentioned how objects turn bright white, not black, but thats just the other side of it. Happens alot with objects placed into caverns or the ground. Here's what the other thread says; It is in reference to using a purple light filter, but the lighting is a trait of Forge. The piece has to be moved avoid the black color, but you could try replacing it with another piece instead. Hope this helps.
It's because Reach uses "fake" lighting (radiosity?) instead of something like raytracing. The game doesn't calculate light and shadow dynamically; rather, when the map itself is created, the game marks "light" and "dark" areas (which inexactly correspond to shadows cast by the map's terrain). The farther an object is into a dark area, the darker the object gets. (So the whole object is shaded based on its location.) The "Light" objects -- dynamic lights -- are the exception here. Furthermore, some objects -- anything interactive, like weapons and Spartans -- do cast shadows. So you may have a case where a Spartan casts a shadow on your Forged floor, even though the fifteen-foot wall next to him doesn't.
They do use radiosity to render the lighting, at least they did in their old games. When I used to build maps for halo pc I always had to run the maps through radiosity to build the light map. This is why the lighting is light and dark in some places and doesn't change when an object comes into that lighting field. The game depends on the light map to know where to put light and where to take it away and the map doesn't account for any objects that are placed in forge.
okay, so that is why when I moved it out of the cliff face, it turned a more normal colour thanks alot, the piece colouring makes a lot more sense now (I thought it was more or less random!)