Citrus by Moss

This is great!

I love when you can view the thumbnail and INSTANTLY know what something is.

I'd suggest you add a switch somewhere that lets you render the image seamlessly without that nice looking gradient. It would be a lot more useful for 3d artists.

Now: http://www.filterforge.com/filters/5423.html has a buddy!

Oh my... such awesomeness.

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Sign Guy wrote: Is this an incredibly slow filter or is something wrong with my system?

It's not you. My time for only 600x600 is 8 min 50 sec!

Besides the time, this filter is very resemblant of its name, nice job and welcome to FF!
I'm not sure how you managed to make this un-tilable (the actual bumps, not the roundness), but it would be awesome if it was tilable. Keep it up!

There's a sharpen followed directly by a blur, rip those out and it'll probably be much faster. There's also a few other blurs which could probably replaced adequately with a threshold, that and the gradient really should be an option.

Probably not ready for EP because of the seamless tile breaking gradient and poor construction. Fix those and It's got my recommendation.

Thanks for all the compliments guys. I guess nobody reads the description because then you would all realize that it can tile fine and you can remove the gradient with the Roundess slider. I also guess you didn't twiddle all the nobs. In the description I explain that the scaling method breaks tiling so IT ONLY TILES WHEN SCALE IS SET TO ZERO. I'm a noob to FF so that's the best I could figure out but from what I understand tiling is very easy to break in FF and it is hard to do scaling and rotating that doesn't break it. If you guys can suggest a better method for scaling I would be glad to implement it.

Actually when I was first going to implement scaling I was plugging the scal slider into all the scale settings for all the noise nodes, but then all the blurs and highpasses and other resolution sensitive things needed to be connected as well and I was doing all that but it was getting horrendously complex. For example some things needed to scale exponentially rather than linearily so I was having to plug the slider into a dummy checker node's colors and then use a gamma adjustment after that and then plug the result of all that into my blur radius or whatever. Anyway I was getting it all done but it was painstaking and the network was a mess and then I realized that performing the scaling towards the very end with offset nodes didn't cause the texture to repeat itself like I thought it would - it actually produced more random texture, so that was obviously a much better solution. Much later on I realized tiling didn't work when scaling was active but given FF's current limitations I think this is the best it can reasonably be?

As for render speed. I rendered it at 2048x2048 with 5 samples in 4 minutes on a Pentium e2160 @ 3Ghz (dual core) with 4 or 3 GB of RAM, whatever Windows recognizes. I noticed it did use a freaking lot of RAM (1.5GB), so maybe that is the important thing to have. If you think there are more efficient ways of doing things I'd like to know. Like I said I'm a FF noob. I just found that I was running into a lot of limitations and had to do things more complicated then I would like. For example there is no way to adjust the density of dots with the Cell component so I had to stack a bunch of them together. My filter network grew exponentially larger as I tried to get it to look more and more realistic and as I added controls. I guess you have to pay some price for realism and flexibility.

I hope this massive post has helped explain some things. Cheers.

Here is the lead preset from the 20 sec version:

Thanks Sphinx, that is much simplified and faster. The blurs were in there for a reason and I think mine looks noticeably better, but I didn't realize blurs were so resource intensive. Maybe adding just a bit of blur to your solution will make a happy medium. You guys must have slow computers because my render times compared to Sphinx's are 5 seconds and 27 seconds. Turning off the antialiasing on mine only drops it to 24 seconds.

That "size, pixels" slider does do the repeating thing that I was worried about, so it is not very useful unless you intentionally want something that repeats itself. I figured people deserve the ability to make more "zoomed out" textures not just extreme close-ups. With your simplified network with no blurs my original scaling method would be much more feasible. I should try it again.

I didn't know what this "EP" was that you guys were talking about but I figured it out. Thanks, I'm honored.

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Moss wrote: The blurs were in there for a reason and I think mine looks noticeably better

Yeah - definitely! It gives a nice subsurface scattering effect, a few bitmap based components won't make that much a difference either - specially if you ensure they're not in the same branch (i.e. one should not be a child of the other). Also you might be able to extract blur/highpass/sharpen from just one if the settings are close, check out this article.

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Moss wrote: You guys must have slow computers because my render times compared to Sphinx's are 5 seconds and 27 seconds. Turning off the antialiasing on mine only drops it to 24 seconds.

I'm on the studio computer now (quadcore, 4gig): 3.2s (sphinx) vs 1.20m (original) vs 17s (original, no aa). Strange with those differences in our performance tests. If I change to a bigger rendering (than 600x600) things get really slow with the original though.

Yummy!

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Moss wrote: You guys must have slow computers

It's OK, you can just say me.

And I found the culprit to the tiling, or at least on Sphinx's. At the end, where the elevation gradient and the roundness are blended together, there is a gradient plugged into the opacity. Color 2 is the slider, and color 1 is a dark gray. Just set that to black and turn roundness down to 0 and it should tile.

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Moss wrote: Sign Guy, your render times sound comparable to mine. At the low resolution your quad cores are eating it up but at the higher resolutions RAM runs out and everything grinds to a halt. The highest I tried was 2048.

I cannot agree because I use 3600 x 3600 as a standard size for mastering and have rendered thousands of tiles at that size. Something is different with your Citrus filter that it would zip through at two minutes for 9 mega pixels and take hours at 13 mega pixels.

Did you use the Pro version or one of the lesser versions?

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Moss wrote: I'm using a demo of the pro version. I see what you are saying. You are saying that my filter is unusual compared to most in that it's render times scale exponentially? I was just saying that your render times compared to mine make sense.

Yes and no. There are lots of filters that have relatively slow render times, but they do not in my experience differ between a 9 mega pixel and a 13 mega pixel by so great a ratio. It would be more proportional. In the case of the sizes I tried, half again longer would be the normal case ... so at 3600 x 3600, your filter should render in about 3 minutes instead of 2. But what I am experiencing is greater than 2 hours.

My concerns are not about your filter or workmanship. They are about what the cause of such an anomaly could be. It may relate to my quad core using XP Pro with 3.x GB of RAM being usable. So that perhaps I am hitting a threshold of overload that you are not. I would very much like to hear the render times of others using 3600 x 3600 and your filter with the roundness and scale set to zero. Then I would have a better idea if my system is at the heart of this.

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Sphinx. wrote: So actually the "size, pixels" slider does exactly what you want. The problem is that some non-variation components are tiled, which is mighty annoying.

Ahhh, I see. So is there no way to prevent the roundess shading from repeating with the "size, pixels" slider?

Great first filter Moss and congrats on that Ep to boot..

Yeah, I see the updated filter. I just expected that the "Update Notes" would show up on the page, but I guess they don't.

Great and realistic filter to make this orange fruit texture

One of my favorite filters