Posted by: MrGreenWithAGun
Posted by: superduper66
Looking at the way Forerunner structures are made and their designs, much of the cohesion should already be noticed. When Godly was talking about the community maps, though, you notice lack of cohesion because the pieces don't "weld" together naturally. They look more like Forge pieces, rather than actual Forerunner structure, much like a Lego House looks different than a real house.
I think you are talking about what I am raising, because you see when I look at the window he said broke cohesion, I didn't think anything was out of place. Why? Because I saw nothing but blocks to begin with.
I wrote a blog on FH. If you have an account, please check it out and tell me what you think. I discuss illusion as hiding the blocks by using perception to show what you want to present. It dawned on me that not one non Forge World map lacked a very strong theme. It also occurred to me, partly because someone commented on this, that each of those maps has their own what appear as limited set of structural blocks. Like Boardwalk has nothing but white walls. Their advantage, however, is that they are custom designed for their respective themes. With Forge World, we are given somewhat neutral color generic blocks. We require using illusion to see past the blocks, to hide the blocks. Without it, at least to me, there is nothing but a pile of blocks.
If I could have used a "Countdown" palette to build my aircraft carrier on Forge World, the walls would not be blocky, but would look like what you find on a carrier (or at least more like). This would have drastically reduced the need to rely on illusion and utilize more the natural building block materials for my theme.
And I have no idea what you mean by Forerunner.
First of all on the topic of the windows. The windows had bad cohesion because they didn't meld with their surroundings. Sure the map had very bad cohesion in general, but you can't expect to fix that all at once. You can slowly work towards a strong cohesive overall map as long as you take notice to small areas and individual objects and how they interact with their environment. While fixing the windows would not fix the cohesion of the whole map, it will help towards a strong cohesive map. Progressing in small steps helps us slowly reach perfection. ;)
Forgeworld does not lack a very strong theme. People just haven't figured out how to craft their own theme quite yet. There is a lot of potential in the forge pieces and you can craft your own theme if you are clever enough. Sure the varying themes do not have very many objects to work with, but with enough ingenuity you can make this happen. I think I did more than just extremely well with my new map Affinity. It presents very strong cohesion to create a Halo CE theme.
I'm learning more and more about cohesion everyday and I hope to start writing about it more in the lessons in the near future. One main thing that I have learned is attention to detail and how one aligns textures when meshing pieces together. Shading is also very important as well as using similar texturing. I haven't learned much about transitioning between textures quite yet, but I'm getting there. There is a lot that one can do to improve the cohesion of their maps and make their map feel like one entity that was not made by a bunch of forge pieces.
Whether you believe it or not, the bungie maps are made of prefabricated objects as well. You can being reused everywhere and this is to save on memory. You can see this a lot on forgeworld as a lot of the rocks are the exact same rocks that we have. On Boneyard there are TONS of objects that are reused all over the map. Sure the objects are custom tailored for the map, but we can definitely learn from this.
Posted by: Sn1p3r C
Hey, Mr. Green, haven't seen you since that Anchor 9 zombie map... any progress?
OT:
One of the ways you can get around this is to copy that tactic - limit yourself to a select few types of pieces in Forge. And, if your map is too big to stick with them, keep the way you put them together consistent. One of my friends did a map that contained a lot of railings. Every time a railing curved, he'd drop a low column over the juncture. It wasn't flashy, but once he was done, it added a bit of flavor to the railed platform - it really seemed like the map was pulled from somewhere instead of built.
Granted, the columns on the railings weren't the only consistent theme, certain spacings in walls of the buildings, consistent angles for ramps, and specifically broken up sight lines all made an appearance, and all helped the map feel like more than some Legos arranged somewhere.
Sniper is definitely hit it home with this post. Keeping a strong theme is easy. Find a few objects that you find mesh well together. Take those objects and twist and turn them to your delight. This will ensure a very stong theme is kept throughout your whole map. This is definitely a technique that I used on Affinity to make it very cohesive. When you use the same architecture in several areas it makes the map feel like a whole, like each area relates to each other. The cage does this by using columns as a connector to wield the ramps with the bridges.
I'm using this technique right now to find a good set of architectural structures to construct my next map to further study the concept of cohesion. Once I have a nice set of structures I can definitely put it up for download so you can see a good example of cohesion and finding things that work together to make a strong theme.