Since the beginning, Filter Forge was all about seamless textures. Basically any filter you created in Filter Forge was automatically seamless, with no extra effort required. This approach was lauded by people who deal with seamless textures on a daily basis, but, on the other hand, it confused a lot of more mainstream graphic artists. Many new users were genuinely puzzled by the absence of elementary tools like Scale, Rotate or unrestricted shapes and gradients – all of which weren't included in Filter Forge because they would break seamless tiling.
But times are changing – Filter Forge 2.0 is no longer confined to seamlessly-tiled filters. Unrestricted, non-tiled textures and effects are now first-class citizens of Filter Forge:

This release marks the beginning of a new era for Filter Forge – we're starting the transition from a niche plugin for texture artists to a powerful toolbox for everyone who deals with digital images. Filter Forge 2.0 includes several important additions that are designed to help our users explore the world of non-seamless textures and effects. Among these new features are components for unrestricted transforms such as Scale, Rotate, Offset, Flip and Lookup, non-tiled Free Gradient, Ellipse, Polygon and Rectangle components, an ability to override filter's automatic detection of its own seamlessness, and a new Value control component that allows filters to accept unlimited numeric values, positive or negative.
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
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“So often software will advertise one thing and not deliver. Your program not only delivers but does it with ease.”
David Hoisington
www.compassionspace.com
“For 3D modelers, Filter Forge is a dream come true. It creates seamless textures with a single mouse click. The professional version creates the following map types for any texture: bump, normal, specular strength, specular exponent, diffuse, metallic, and alpha. The same filter can be used to generate any resolution, since filters are procedural.”
Bob Nolin
www.digitalimagemagazine.com