FF 4.0 Grouping and Instances - Comments, suggestions and opinions

Well I love it

Super useful to make complex filters more managable. Also great to make custom components, for example spirals, for use in other filters.

Only thing that annoys me, is that you can´t see the end result from inside a group. I think the group result needs a switch between group and filter result

Edit: Ok, if you leave it locked to result that works, but if you view another component then you have to go back out, lock it to result again and go back in.

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I have yet to try a groups within groups....Kinda reminds me of this toy.. smile;) smile:D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll

Hehe, I tried it, it works

Haven´t paid attention to that yet, Uber. Guess we will have to do some tests

Something which would be nice to have in the group component, would be a varation control, or some other randomizing option. Something that randomizes the variations and inputs, within their limits, if no controls are connected.
so that you, for example could connect 5 copies of a group to a bomber and have 5 different outputs without needing to duplicate all controls 5 times.

I like it very much. I hope people will use it to simplify and semi-document their filters. Grouping components into well named groups will make it much easier to understand what the different parts of a filter are trying to achieve. The big drawback - only one output allowed. This is a pretty big drawback IMHO. I have a filter where there are two bombers required - one for the color of the result and one for the height of the surface in the result. I've got many identical inputs going into these bombers and I'd hoped I could put them in a group so that these inputs would go once into the group and then withing the group feed into both bombers. This would simplify the filter greatly, but sadly, since one bomber feeds the color of the result and the other feeds the height, this isn't doable at present since I am sadly restricted to one output. Since there are only two bombers envisioned for this group, putting each into it's own separtate group doesn't make any sense so I'm forced to have two big bombers present in the filter with nearly identical inputs which is something I hoped this feature would eliminate for me. In general, there are lots of situations where one logical group of components work together to produce two or more results. This isn't allowed for in the current design.

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You guys getting any performance improvements after modifying a filter to use instances?

There shouldn't be any. Instances can't and don't speed up the rendering, they're just for convenience.

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There shouldn't be any. Instances can't and don't speed up the rendering, they're just for convenience.

I see. Well I guess those performance gains will have to come from a different new feature.

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I'd like the ability to give instanced groups different random seeds. (or is that impossible)

Create an IntSlider input, name it Variation and wire it to whatever you like. You can easily have two or more Variation inputs wired to various clusters of components inside the Group. Or you can have randomizable components with unwired Variation inputs inside the group if you like their noise pattern and want it fixed.

Each instance will have its own values of these Variation inputs.

That doesn´t really work all that well. You can´t connect an intslider to a checkbox for example. And the randomizer doesn´t work with unconnected inputs.

But you can´t connect one slider to everything, without getting the red exclamation mark and undesired results, especially tricky with color controls. So an inbuilt option to randomize all the groups controls values would be nice...

Well the problem with Vladimir´s solution is that you need several sliders for all the randomizations of a more comlex group. And for me having 5 variation sliders in a filter doesn´t cut it. That´s messy and ugly.

Here is an example. Since nothing is connected to them the top 4 groups don´t get randomized at all, instanced or not. Try connecting an int slider to a checkbox

Well it would open up a lot of possibilities
In my example above I would love 4 of the 5 particles to be randomized without the user having to tweak them/ being scared by 50 controls

Well I guess it is doable with a few "variation" sliders.

Would it be possible to add a "Custom Components" Section in the components tab, where we could store groups for easy access? Maybe with the option to make subcategories.

Edit:

Atm when you connect controls to a group, you can´t edit the values from inside the group anymore. This becomes extremely annoying after a while, especially when you nest lots of groups. It would be great if you could tweak the values at any point

Also atm when you have a switch or multiblend with groups connected, and you group up that, leaving groups out, you get color controls inside the new group representing the incoming groups. It works, but it´s irritating and ofc you cannot enter them.

Dilla, what would be the exact wording of the warning that would be sufficiently good to you?

Now for something completely different:

Is there a limit to nested groups?

I mean, I've just been "CTRL+A > CTRL+G 'ing" for about 30 seconds before I got bored, and it appeared to me that - for practical considerations - groups can be nested infinitely? Is this really desirable, or should there be some sane limit - say 12 levels of nested depth or something?

From this other thread

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Gisoft Hello ! I'm a new user. I try to understand the group feature but with difficulty. How to group ? What to group ? Why to group ? I'm a visual person and I need examples with its results for a better understanding. Someone can give me a visual help, please ?

I am also a visual person and also like more visual examples for a better and easier understanding

How to group is easy to answer, and is explained with graphical screenshots in this page here and also how to edit them

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Creating groups is very easy. Just select components you want to group and click the Group button that has been added to the top toolbar of the Filter Editor:

Also you can make a group clicking on the right button on windows to open the menu and select "group"

What to group is a less easy question, but this depends of what you want to do, and it could be many possible things. One example could be that you could have an snippet and instead of having all the components "in the wild" you can make a group of all of them and have just the output.

Why to group is something also subjetive, 3 reasons I have found is that this way you can reduce the clutter on a complex filter and can organize it better and also that a more important thing perhaps is that you CAN NAME the group, so you can know what this group of components is for and what it does, and would be better to understand when you want to know what it does the things.

Also as said above you can convert snippets (that are NOT surface ones and does not have the lighting tab) into one group and so it would be easier to manage and to use.

Surely there can be more answers to all 3 questions, and is up to other to complete this.

One nice sugestion for groups:

Double click on empty space push you out from a group
I think it will be very natural to do it this way

that's the meaning of beta testing. If you wanna know more, you should ask my friend who worked at Bethesda testing Skyrim. Every possible thing has to be tested. Every possible weapon combo in every mission, in every place, in every move, in every door you go through, and you have to remember everything you do or otherwise certain bugs don't happen.

This also mildly encourages me to test FilterForge 4 in more brutal ways.

There's been a whole discussion about how Component Grouping functionality brings with it the need for a complete system revolving around the organization and sharing of Custom Components.

I do not now what Vlad's plans are for FF4, but with the sheer amount of work needed to realize a full-featured Custom Components system, I think we can safely assume that it is outside the scope of the FF4 beta.

You're right, even in bare-bones form a Custom Component system should at least provide the ability to save Custom components to the Component Bar. I'd really like to see this in FF4 as well.

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Crapadilla Custom Component system should at least provide the ability to save Custom components to the Component Bar. I'd really like to see this in FF4 as well.

As I have already commented above, it would be very useful to be able to save a group as a Snippet to be able to have it easily available in a custom components bar, it would not need to have categories and folders, just one additional category for custom groups or groups as snippets as I have already suggested also in this other thread

Be able to have the FF Filter Snippets INSIDE the filter editor to use

This would make much higher the usefulness of the groups

Any official comment on a Custom Components Bar being included in FF4? I've largely been putting off further filter development, for my own use at least, until this can be clarified. The time saved by drag and drop vs. open filter ->open component->copy->open filter ->open component->paste is considerable in terms of "the flow" no? Maybe I'm spoiled.

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Any official comment on a Custom Components Bar being included in FF4?

For FF4, alas, no.

For future versions, yes.

We'd like to implement custom components the proper way (submitting / downloading via online component library, similar to filters, with ratings, tags, editor picks, "official endorsements" etc, as suggested here: http://www.filterforge.com/forum/read...nav_start), so this is a bit too much for FF4.0. We're already running late with the existing feature set.