Filter Forge - What Can It Do?
OrionPax09
Posts: 419
Okay. I know about Filter Forge 4.0 Pro here at DAZ. And according to the description, it's capable of creating seamless textures, which is something that I genuinely want to be able to do. And with the current flash sale, I'm more interested. But before I plunk down the money, I would like some more specifics on its full capabilities.
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That's a bit of a tall order, OrionPax09. Your best bet is to visit the homepage for Filter Forge, and go from there:
https://www.filterforge.com/
FilterForge is one of my main tools for making textures (and making other graphical things too). I often wrap up a small Filter that trying to figure out how to do that thing in Photoshop.
The Current Version of FilterForge is 7.0 (I wonder which version you will get, ask before you buy though)
Download the 30 days trial from FilterForge.com and play with it, learn how to make filters by downloading exisiting ones, take them apart and learn the tricks, thats how I got started back in 2009.
Here is a link to my filterpage: https://www.filterforge.com/filters/author9953-page1.html
Have fun!
Well, at present, my objective is to be able to create seamless textures and even PBR Smart Materials. Can Filter Forge do that? Or are the better options for that sort of work?
probably Algorithmic Substance Designer would be more your thing, I one day might save up for it.
Auto create a seamless texture from an image... Eh... Sort of... There are a couple of those... They do an okay job with certain images/textures. They usually work by offsetting the image from the center and then blurring and transparently feathering what used to be the edges which are now the center of the image... It's basically the oldest Photoshop trick to make a seamless texture, but done automatically. A piece of concrete or patch of dirt might come out okay... Bricks, diagonal stripes, certain fabric patterns... Not so much.
Create a Filter Forge based seamless texture... Yes, pretty well... If you cook up your own you can get bump, normal map and occlusion too. Many of the premade filters have those too... Older ones may not, but if it were say a fabric texture, you could use a normal or bump map from another filter, so that might not matter.
Create a smart PBR material (mmmm... Peanut butter) for iRay directly in filter forge... No. You could make elements of the material in Filter Forge, but you can't make the iRay material in Filter Forge and then take it over to DS and use it.
I like that the software is full featured no matter what license you get, the breakdown between indie and pro is super fair (under $100k-Indie, over $100k Pro), and that they don't force a subscription on you.
$300 for all three or $150 each as Indie isn't bad either.
If you want to "texture" directly on meshes, Substance Painter is your choice, and probably the Substance Suite to get Designer and access to ther Substance Source Library.
You can export metallic maps from FilterForge, and several others, but they are seamless tiling, not directly applied to the mesh.
Substance Designer work much like FilterForge but for me personally FilterForge seams to have a more natural workflow, but I guess it's becuase I haven't found those perfect combinations of nodes that does "just what I want" i SD, that I have in FF.
I have Substance Painter and FF6, and love both for different things.
FF is great at creating a wide variety of seamless textures. It's also a nice source of some post filters.
They synergize well; you can create a diffuse and bump (and other maps, if so inclined) with FF, then apply it to a figure with Substance Painter.
I do that too (You could make the textures in Substance Designer but it still has more aim at live textures )
I haven't had a chance to play with Substance Designer; I already spent all that money on SP, and have FF, so... meh.
SD works like FF, but weirder (my personal reflection), it's bound to pixels and not resolution independent which I dislike the most. Very hard to get 4k textures when most noices are at 1K or maybe 2K resolutions.
With all the emphasis on textures, it should be pointed out that Filter Forge is also a fantastic tool for plain old postwork. There are dozens of excellent toon, sketch and paint-type looks, fractal generators, utilities for creating planets, maps, starfields, etc., and wide range of filters, effects, sharpeners and diffusers. I've been using FF since version 3 and I still keep discover new "old" filters that I've never tried before.
Regarding the 'flash sale', FilterForge have a constant 80% sale since.. ages ago.
I don't mind it since 80% is a good deal, but it's a bit problematic when they claim that it's always 2 days left.
I think the textures made from Substance Painter and Designer are higher quality, but FilterForge also offers powerful tools for postwork as others have mentioned.
Creating new filters for postwork is fairly fast when you have experience with FF and it's in my opinion a fun environment to play around with postwork ideas.
Often I have found that a custom designed filter I made for a particular type of render, also works well with the next render.
Add some variations to sliders and you have a nice new tool that can speed up your postwork process in the future.
Especially great if you have a batch of photos or renders with similar lighting and issues you want to fix: no need to repeat all the postwork steps by memory and repetition, just apply your filter and wait for it to render.
Id you use Mac OS X, I have a little Donationware, FFBatchMaster, that runs filters using the FFCmdRenderer, and the new version can chain filters and run on a folder of images. The old one is also great, specially for creatíng multiple renders of the same filter on one process.
I really wrote it when I had made a filter that generated "fantasy dungeon doors" for topdown dungeon maps, and I wanted to generate 1000 doors in on go...
Making your own filters by studying ones you like is the best way to see what Filter Forge does. These are some of mine:
https://filterforge.com/filters/7084.html
I start by trying to make it do something I need.
Actually 6 is the current version, 7 is beta. I originally got FF5 from giveaway of the day a while back and was able to use that to upgrade to 6 for $60. 5 is 32 bit while 6 is 64 bit native.
Yes, sorry 7 is still beta...
This is very true. Even if you do not dig under the hood and build your own filters, there are thousands of free, pre-made filters you can download and tweak to your liking. That, plus the postwork possibilities, are why I prefer FF to a purely texture-generation program like Genetica. There are many times when I will create a multilayerd graphics file in which most of the layers are treated to a FF filter and then combined and edited in some way to produce a final artwork.
It's also really easy to create some abstract art on the fly using FF, in case you want to have some custom modern art hanging on the walls of the chic apartments in your renders.
The constant 80% sale is ridiculous and unprofessional, but software is functional. As far as I know, it's only 32 bit and it doesn't seem to benefit from more cpu cores. I've also had lots of crashes trying to filter high resolution files (4k images an above, sometimes 4800 x 6000) in the photoshop plugin, but there is a standalone version of the software that is more stable with high res images.
FilterForge 6 is 64 bit.
Oh that's good to know, thanks. I'll have to check which version I'm runnning when I'm back at my desktop. Any idea about running faster on more cores?
FilterForge uses all cores (as long as the filter doesn't do stupid operations preventing Multithreading
That could be a problem.if you use it as a PhotoShop plugin and use an older 32 bit version of PS.
Ah, that could explain it...maybe the specific filters I'm using are the issue.
Personally, I always use FF in standalone mode; Photoshop already consumes a lot of system resources and I have no problem going back and forth as part of workflow.
As an aside, FotoSketcher is an AMAZING art filter app, and is free. I bring it up because a lot of the postwork I attempt with FilterForge, I find sometimes the 'goal' I'm shooting for works better in FotoSketcher.
Which toon filters do you recommend to cartoonize the entire image?
There's no one pushbutton solution as it depends on the lighting and contrast of the original image. For a classic toon look, my personal approach is to duplicate the image a couple of times, then find a sketch filter that gives me nice solid black line art on white... StevieJ's Ultasketch-Black is a good one to start with.. and then use that in the top layer in PSD in color burn or multiply mode, over a second image processed with whichever filter gives me the most solid colors. Cell Painter is a good one there.
I used a couple of slightly modified Stevie J filters when I needed to turn renders into line art, they are very good.
No simple filter will be perfect, because there's no way for an algorithm to know that any group of pixels is one contiguous figure vs. background stuff.
You either need to do multiple passes to help identify objects, or some system that outlines/blocks out figures, or something similar.
That SAID, some filters can help a lot.
Thank you all for the filter suggestions!