Marbles by Skybase

Welp, it's been very long since my last filter. If you're one of those people who know the 90s and Photoshop, you may remember KPT (Kai's Power Tools). One of the plugins the package offered was a filter called Spheroid Designer which made some cool spheres with procedural textures on it. I always wanted to do that and I always liked that idea.

At some point in my life as I was going through my stuff I happened to remember that and decided "why not in FilterForge?" While this isn't a 1:1 replication, obviously KPT did far more and far better, I wanted to try and bring something back to the table anyway.

Originally this filter was slow. I didn't like the idea of releasing a slow filter publicly so I just held onto it for a whole year. At some point I asked Kevin if he could optimize this filter. He really did. What used to take 90 seconds to render for a 600x600 image is down to just 29 seconds (on my machine). I did end up extrapolating from his method since originally it didn't work with different ratios. This version should / does. It does come with a cost of a bit of a hackish way of achieving the effect so I'll work on it over time and see how to properly do it.

It's been long. I'm happy to see FilterForge strong. I hope this filter can bring some creativity to your table.

Very beautiful!