Is it impossible to flip a piece off a 45 rotation?

It's a bug that's been around since Reach. You can grab an incline 1 by 1 or 2 by 2 and try and align the wall's angle manually with it to sort of get around it.
It think it's stupid 343i didn't do anything about this, but it might be because they never needed it and therefore never noticed.

 

Try using the edit coordinates option. You wanna move the pitch. Keep it on 45 degrees-edit coordinates-move the pitch up/down however many units you need it to. The same problem happens to me but this helps. Hopefully it helps you too

 

change the snap angle
grab the piece, move, let go,
snap back to your regular angle, grab and align

 

I remember an old Bungie post stating that Rotation Snap was optimized for single-axis rotations. What you're trying to do is a double-axis rotation.

Basically, there are "global axes of rotation" for the world, and "local axes" for the object you're currently working with. This image from Wikipedia shows global axes in blue and local axes in red; you'll see that when the object rotates, its local axes rotate with it.

The problem is that Rotation Snap rotates objects based on the global axes, rather than the local axes. After the first 45-degree rotation, your object's local axes don't line up with the global axes, so you'll have a hard time doing any additional rotations using Rotation Snap.

 

You basically mean to rotate it 45 degrees down and then 45 degrees to the side? I think this is either impossible or very difficult to do freehand, but you can turn rotation snap off and set the degree for both manually in the "Edit Coordinates" tab.

EDIT: lol, ninja'd by like four people.

 

Certain Affinity did the Forge crap updates... meaning they added magnets and called it a day. Forge 2.1 enjoy folks.... can't wait to see what updates come for Halo 5 Forge... Magnets 2.0 and Precision editing... Done. Forge 2.15 in the house coming soon (2015).

But on a Sirius note... Certain Affinity had no business being allowed to update forge (much less getting paid for it), they obviously never used Forge before.

 

Coordinates can work, but it will not be intuitive -- especially if you start from scratch and use them to do all the rotations. They use global axes as well, so you can't put in 45 and 45 and call it a day. You'll end up having to do some weird angles that "add up" to 45, with no discernible relation between any of the numbers.

Best to use Rotation Snap for the first 90 and 45 rotations, and then position the camera so you can freehand the second 45 rotation. Once you have it about right, that's when you use Coordinates to try and perfect it.

 

Just freehand that ****, yo.

 

^THIS

that's the best explanation in here really. the game should allow the axes of each object to rotate with the object, but instead it only allows rotation across the game's preset axes.

that's a stupid feature, not a glitch or a bug.

like someone else said, just freehand that shite...

 

Word. ^

 

Okay, no one has suggested this method yet: First grab a 2x2 ramp steep, place it sideways. This will make your 45 degree angle. Now grab that 5x1 and place it vertically on a 90 degree angle. Place it near the 2x2 steep you have. Your basically going to be using the ramps angle to push your piece up against it. This will ensure you have that perfect 45 degree angle. So, make the 5x1 have fixed properties so that it doesn't phase through the ramp. Now start turning that 5x1 until it's almost at a 45 with the ramp. When it's almost there, stop using coordinates to turn it. Now grab the 5x1 and push it up against the sideways ramp. Since its fixed, the 5x1 should be at an exact 45 degree angle that you couldn't achieve by just rotating it. You might want to align it against two ramps, so that when you push the 5x1 against it, it doesn't mess up the other axis. Hope you're getting what I'm throwing out there, and I hope it solves the problem.

 

This is how I used to get semi-decent angles in h3. It's a fairly accurate technique, just make sure to lock your objects after setting them down so you don't accidentally pick it up and **** it all up.

 

Meh, locking objects just seems like more work for the forger. Maybe just lock off-snap objects like the aforementioned tricky 5x1. Reasons why I think locking objects is pointless: Objects don't shift to the current snap you have when you grab them anymore. So you can grab a 5 degree piece on 45 snap and it won't move. Also, by locking a piece, your making sort of a commitment to keep the piece where it is, and not find a possible better option. When I forge, I'll sometimes delete whole sections of a map to try and make something better, if everything's locked, how are you even supposed to work with your pieces. Really it just encourages sticking with the first thing you build. Thirdly, the overall time it takes to lock and unlock pieces while you work with them, it's gunna slow down your forging as a whole. And last but not least, I have never accidentally grabbed the wrong piece or moved the wrong object. Even if I did, the time it takes to move that one piece back is going to be much less than the time it takes to lock and unlock objects while forging.

All in all, locking is mostly useless in my opinion. Still have never used magnets or locking.

 

weird... after so many mis-grabbed objects in Reach (the little forging I did for a few months) I am extremely anal about locking everything. I hate grabbing the wrong object by accident.

but back to the idea of using the angled pieces to help you line up objects, I thought his issue was with not rotating in 45 on one axis, but actually doing it on two axes, or is that also possible with using the "physics" trick?

I thought someone eluded to it so that's why I didn't suggest it. plus the fact that it seems like it would only work for one axis, not two. I may have read you wrong, though.

 

This fella back in 2010 (!) came up with a math-based way to do odd rotations using an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately it appears the link to his spreadsheet is dead now. I used it once before with very good results. But practically speaking, it's often quicker to either use a rotated incline piece to get the angle you need, or freehand it. I've noticed that it's easy to rotate a piece along the horizontal axis without affecting its vertical angle at all; so what I sometimes do is rotate it to the angle I want vertically, then turn rotation snap off and freehand rotate it horizontally to the angle it needs to be. If you place a flat block at a 45 degree angle first, you can use it for comparison to visually gauge when the object you're rotating is exactly at 45 also.

 

Basically, use the Incline as a brace for a fixed-physics Block 5x1. Brilliant.

 

It really is simple but brilliant.

 

Welcome to literally the whole map when Shoe and I built Dust on the Horizon.