Features
Filter Forge 2.0 – What's New
We have released the long-anticipated second version of Filter Forge. Explore the new possibilities offered by the new powerful Filter Forge and take your creativity to the next level! Filter Forge 2.0 features new lighting options and shadows via ambient occlusion, support for scripting and over 40 new components for creating filters, full HDR support that drastically enhances the level of realism, and much more. Read More...
Key Features
Filter Editor
The most important feature of Filter Forge – a visual node-based editor which lets you create your own visual effects and procedural textures.
Online Filter Library
Filter Library is a free online repository of filters submitted by Filter Forge users. You can access the Library directly from the user interface of Filter Forge. Users who contribute good filters can earn rewards, including a free copy of Filter Forge.
Seamless Tiling
Most filters in Filter Forge support seamless tiling, even for non-square textures. A simple one-click operation, Seamless Tiling works no matter whether you have downloaded the filter or created it yourself in Filter Editor.
Bump and Normal Maps
Filter Forge can generate diffuse, bump, specular and normal maps for its filters – most seamlessly tiled, and all fully anti-aliased and perfectly matching each other – a real life-saver for artists working on textures for next-gen games.
Resolution Independence
All filters in Filter Forge are generated procedurally and don't depend on external bitmaps; therefore, they are resolution-independent. You can render the same filter in any resolution without losing any detail.
Technology
HDRI Lighting
Instead of the old-style point lights, Filter Forge lighting system uses high dynamic range images that capture real-world lighting conditions. As a result, you get real-world lighting which takes almost no time to set up.
16- and 32-Bit Image Modes
Filter Forge uses a full floating-point rendering pipeline, which allows it to support 16-bit images and the new 32-bit image mode in Photoshop CS2.
Floating-Point File Formats
You can save your work in high-precision image formats such as OpenEXR or PFM. Unlike the traditional image formats such as JPG or BMP, these formats use floating-point numbers to store the pixels, which allows to retain every single bit of precision.
Smart Anti-Aliasing
Anti-aliasing, when done in the usual brute-force way, can be devastating to rendering speed. Filter Forge applies anti-aliasing only to those areas of the image that tend to produce aliasing artifacts, which results in vastly improved rendering times.
Dual-Core CPU Support
Filter Forge rendering engine is built to fully utilize the power of dual-core and quad-core processors. A dual-core processor can speed the rendering up to 96% (83 to 86% is the norm). Once we even saw a speedup of 115% – don't ask, we have no idea how that is possible!
Huge Resolutions
The biggest one we tried was 65536x65536 pixels – and it worked! Granted, it took hours, but anyway! Furthermore, the interface remained responsive – we were able to zoom and pan the preview while rendering that monstrosity.
Interface
Standalone Version
Filter Forge can work as a Photoshop plugin or a standalone application. Actually, the plugin part of Filter Forge is tiny – all it does is sending and retrieving the images. All processing is done within the main application.
Adaptive Previews
The preview window in Filter Forge is always fully interactive – you can pan and zoom during the rendering. Plus, if you zoom in on a region of the image while rendering, Filter Forge will increase the rendering priority for that region so that you can see the results faster.
Presets
You can save the settings of any filter as a preset to recall them at any time. All filters included with Filter Forge come with factory presets that give you a glimpse of what a filter can do and provide a good starting point to explore the filter's settings.
Randomizer
With Randomizer, you can randomize filter settings in one mouse click – a relief for those who don't want to learn the controls just to explore a filter. You can configure the randomization strength, plus there's a Back button allowing you to return to the previously generated settings in case you click Next too eagerly.
Favorites
Favorites allow you to quickly access the filters you use most frequently – just add a filter to Favorites and its shortcut will appear in the Favorites folder.
Filter Forge is – by quite a margin – the most powerful plug-in we've looked at here. That's because it's a tool for creating plug-ins, both generative texture-creation tools and effect filters.
Neil Bennett
Digital Arts
www.digitalartsonline.co.uk
Filter Forge 2.0 is out!
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“I do think you guys are likely the best software company I've ever had dealings with.”
Ian Davis
Digital Artist
www.ionclad.com/
“I needed rock textures and instead of the usual day it takes me to make one, I was able to make 20! Again – applause to you all.”
David Hoisington
www.compassionspace.com
