Omni Fictor: A Forge Portfolio

Hi there. I'm just a guy who loves to make things in Forge, the Halo level editor. I post things on YouTube, Reddit, and ForgeHub already, but I wanted to make a website to serve as an artistic portfolio of sorts. Here, I can keep a wider variety of media in a single place, making it easier to demonstrate my work to a potential employer or other newcomer. And as a personal space, it also allows me to go into a bit more detail on things than the other places where I post my work.  E-mail me at [email protected], chat me up on Xbox Live at Omni42, or watch my videos on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/user/0mni42. Also, I have a Patreon!  https://www.patreon.com/omniart

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A few more ships

Again and again, I keep coming back to this idea of having a map based around fully controllable custom scripted ships in Forge. It’s so tantalizingly possible. But every time I try, it just never seems to work.

...Probably because I jump straight from “I can control this single block” to “the same principle should work for anything, so I’ll make an entire ship.” Somewhere in the middle there, things get a bit wonky.

Take this guy, for instance. The red cockpit area can be flown around just fine, but once you add in the rest of it, not so much.

I wasn’t all that happy with the design anyway though, so I started over.

This vaguely steampunk-ish thing was meant to fill the same role: a mobile base that a team could use as a jumping-off point into the rest of the map, or maybe duel another identical ship.

The three circles on the ground there are the controls: forward, turn left, turn right. All you gotta do is stand on them. But when I tried it, nothing moved no matter what I did. After a bit of experimentation, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that if a scripted group involves more than 64 individual objects, it either fails to move or doesn’t move properly. This ship was a little under 100 objects IIRC, so I had to redesign it.

This slimmer version had under 64 parts and could indeed be steered, but for some ungodly reason, it completely refused to move forward. I could get it to go backward, down, up, side to side, anything... except forward. Reorienting the parent object, using a different parent object, reversing the values of the “go backward” script, absolutely nothing worked. :|

...and I never figured out a workaround. There is no happy end to this story, other than that I made something kinda neat. :P

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Cursed Helmets

“This is exactly what I wanted to see today!” -Nobody.

You’re welcome, nobody.

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Another idea that's been in my head for way too long; in this case, eight years. I think this is the fifth time I've redesigned it, but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out this time.

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Just some ideas that have been bouncing around in my head lately.

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A Metroid Comic

Time for another “I’ve been drawing Samus instead of doing Forge stuff, sorry not sorry” post. Enjoy the result of the last two months of my life, lol.

Also, this wasn’t the original intent of this project, but it seems timely, so... this is your daily reminder to not shoot things just because they frighten you. 

Edit: someone on reddit suggested that I make a Patron for this kind of thing. So I did. ;)

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Warframe Doors

More like Doorframe, eh? Eh? Yeah, okay. Made a handful of these door prefabs the other day. All are scripted to open on approach, except the Locked ones.

Grineer Door:

Grineer Door, Locked:

Grineer Door, Alarmed:

This door will still open if you get close, but if you rush through it, you’ll be hurt by the laser grid. Shooting the light above the door disables it.

Corpus Door:

Corpus Door, Locked:

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Longboat

Original design.

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Some Housekeeping

Looking through all my screenshots, there have been a handful of things that I finished (or at least want to show off) but never posted here. So here ya go.

I recreated the Vault of the Spring Maiden from RWBY. Might turn it into a full aesthetic map sometime.

This is from a puzzle map that I never quite got a handle on. Plenty of stuff done visually, but no coherent plan for puzzles, progression, etc.

This is one half a map I made with Fred, based on a multiplayer map from Metroid Prime 2. We did “finish” it, but I never felt like it really worked in gameplay terms, and doing the bare minimum geometry ate up all the budgets.

I also made these two decorative walls for the map, but they had to get cut for budget reasons--a shame, since they’re not terribly complicated.

Way back before we made Focal Point, I wanted to make a Sanctuary Fortress themed version of Adrift from Halo 4. I scrapped it when we decided to make an original design, but I did get a fair amount done on this base.

Ages ago, I made this recreation of the transporter room from Star Trek TOS. Never really had anything to use it for, but I also recreated a bunch of different transporter effects.

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Here comes the juice!

Back when season 4 of The Expanse came out, I made a couple prefabs for it (which I kinda forgot to post at the time--oops), starting with the bridge of the Rocinante.

I also tried my hand at creating a more book-accurate design for the gyroscopic Crash Couches that the crew use.

Though repositioning them is a bit of a chore, they can recreate some pretty crazy angles that the show couldn’t pull off for budget reasons.

And thanks to an invisible Mongoose, you can even sit in them!

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Torvus Clockwork

After about 6 months of sitting on this map, I’ve decided to go ahead and publish it, warts and all. Some parts of it were never properly ironed out, but I just want to get it out there. 

This, at long last, is what I was making all those gears for: a steampunk-style arena map based on the Torvus Bog! The entire thing was inspired by this awesome remix by DarkeSword at OCRemix. 

The level is essentially a miniature version of the entire underwater section of the Torvus Bog.

Some extra paths were added to make it more viable as a multiplayer map, but the basic layout is the same. Three outer rooms around a central hub, each with three entrances: the pipe that connects to the previous room, a ramp to the bottom of the hub, and a side passage that connects to a different part of the hub. 

Each of the outer rooms has a color and a theme associated with it to keep them distinct. Since each room’s side passage connects to a different elevation, the number of lights above the door indicates how high it is. 

“Engine Room” is green, and is full of gears and pistons.

(I also added a little diagram of the map to the wall.)

“Cage” is purple, and filled with rocks and mud. 

And “Yellow Pipes” is, well, yellow. It’s also full of overgrown plant life. 

Unlike the tubes in Prime 2, the ones on Torvus Clockwork are one-way, so players won’t smash into each if they enter from opposite sides. They also give you a fair amount of momentum, so you can come flying out of a pipe and skip across the room into the next pipe and keep going. 

The main hub is probably the most recognizable part of the map to anyone who’s played Prime 2. Just like the original, the bottom has a lift that shoots you up to the top of the map, where two pairs of platforms rotate around the center. 

That’s where things got a bit frustrating with this map. Anyone who’s tried to make a rotating object in H5F knows that it doesn’t usually work, and this map is full of rotating gears. I never did get them to work 100% of the time; that’s the wart I mentioned. But since the whole place is flooded, I guess it doesn’t exactly break immersion to have some of the gears struggling to move. 

As per usual, I hid a little Samus doll on the map as an easter egg for anyone who manages to climb up here. I phased it into the block so it looks more like a discarded helmet than a doll, which I think looks a lot better. 

Anyway, if you want to compare my map to the original, here’s a video. 

 And if you want to see my map in action, here’s another video. ;)

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guidelines.mp4

A+ job everybody.

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Sword of Acala

I had some crazy ideas about recreating Ikaruga’s gameplay in Forge. I failed, but at least I got a neat prefab out of it. 

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Lotus Flowers

There really isn’t any story or purpose behind this, apart from the fact that I was messing around and wanted to make some kind of alien structure. The first version looked a bit like a flower, so I just ran with it and now I guess I’ve got these giant Lotus-shaped structures as prefabs; no idea what I might use them for. 

Also, turns out that this design meshes with itself fairly well as a lid or something. Thought it might be neat as some kind of beacon or lighthouse. 

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Gears & Gears & Gears

There’s a certain project I’ve been working on lately (that will hopefully be finished soon) which involves a lot of gears. Sadly, I made most of them before I realized that you can’t really get gears to convincingly mesh together and move in Forge. Oh well. 

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Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.

The Hunt for Red October is one of my all-time favorite movies. (I’ve actually been onboard one of the submarines they used while filming!) I watched it again recently, and on a whim threw together a replica of Red October herself. I’m not 100% sure if it’s 1/1 scale, but I think it’s relatively close. 

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The Stone-Like

One more Ikaruga prefab for ya.

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Original Ship Designs

I just realized that I’m woefully behind on putting all my stuff up here, so here are a few ship designs from a while back.

As you can see from this old art, the Apex has been kicking around in my head for quite some time. It was originally created for a certain original story that may or may not ever see the light of day again, but the ship’s simple geometry made it fairly easy to make in Forge.

This is another ship from the same story; its creators are energy-based beings that have no need for much physical space in their ships, so said ships are almost paper-thin.

This is an automated defense drone used by the Apex’s larger cousins. It’s also flyable in-game. 

After making the Yukikaze, I thought it would be neat to make some other retro-style ship, and this is what popped out. Meh.