Not sure if I need v4 upgrade or not

kirkl13, welcome to the forum

Do you already own Filter Forge 3.0?

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kirkl13 It still the same soft with all the same shortcomings unfortunately:

Well until now there is not enough news to make a decision if you will want to upgrade or not, as there is only just 2 new features, groups and loops and is promised in the FF Wiki that there will be a new Filter Manager, you will have to wait until more news appear or until the final release of FF 4.0

Be aware that any future filters that are released, that are made with FF 4.0 even if they do not use any of the new FF 4.0 features will be incompatible with FF 3.0

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kirkl13 1 - Groups are useless till it's possible to save them into a kind of library to be reused

Sorry, but I have to disagree with this as the groups are not only for making snippets (groups of components to be used later for other things in other filters) and they useful to be able to make things like for example Arial TD Font Snippet by ThreeDee that would be complex and difficult to make without the groups, at least in a clean and organized way.

For more groups information please, see this thread FF 4.0 Grouping and Instances - Comments, suggestions and opinions

And is also useful the groups to separate parts of a filter and name what this part does, or also to make conditional filters where you can isolate parts of the filter in groups and only use the ones you want and have them all together, and surely there are much more uses for groups, so I do not think they are useles.

I too would love to be able to save groups as snippets and have them available easily

If you see at the middle of the thread above I have already suggested to be able to save groups as snippets and also have made a thread about this too

Be able to have the FF Filter Snippets INSIDE the filter editor to use
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kirkl13 2. Very slow render which seems re-render the whole graph once I touch any minor setting. It makes any little tweak time consuming and annoying. Would be so much easier if it re-render only necessary nodes.

There has been a LOT of threads about this topic and I have to say that Vladimir have confirmed that there will not be any change in the render speed for FF 4.0

I agree that FF can be sometimes very slow to render depending on the filter you are using and the computer you have, and I am also find it time consuming and annoying to have to have to wait each time to re-render after any minor setting change, and would surely be much better if the preview could be much faster to cutomize and modify the settings to reach to the result you want, but regretably this will not happen in FF 4.0

You already have a post on page 3 of FF Slow

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Vladimir Golovin Quote SpaceRay Is FF Inc. making something for FF 4.0 to have a FASTER render engine? For FF4.0, no.

You can see this answer and the reasons why it will not be included in FF 4.0 in the second page of this thread here below

Is FF Inc. making something for FF 4.0 to have a FASTER render engine?

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kirkl13 2. No connection to specific psd layers or at least a layered psd output

Sorry that I do not know what you mean with this, could you explain it better with more details?

Do you mean to be able to load a PSD file with layers inside FF standalone and apply a filter to a specific layer of that file?

Because if this is what you want, you can already do this with Photoshop, open the file you want and sel ect the specific layer and then go to Filters ---> Filter Forge so it picks only this layer

Somewhere else in the forum has been said although do not know where, that FF can´t be able to have a layered PSD output because technical reasons, and also can´t be possible to load a PSD file in the standalone version.

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kirkl13 3. no crop image tool

Crop Image tool? Inside Filter Forge? Sorry that I do not get it and understand.

Do you mean to be able to crop inside FF any image that you load into FF standalone?

Why would you need this? Do you mean after or before applying the filter?

It is supossed that when you load the image you want into FF has been already prepared before with Photoshop or any other graphic software, so you would not need to crop it inside FF, or at least this is what I think.

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kirkl13 It's still so far from what I really need , a decent node and instance driven procedural image/texture editor so I would get rid of damn photoshop entirely

Well, I think that FF will never be a image editor that could replace Photoshop and have similar tools

If you looking for a node based alternative you can see here ->OT: Are there any other cool node based programs out there?

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kirkl13 I like so lot of things in Filter forge over Substance designer which is a weird mess imo and inconvenient to work. But at least it seems like moving in the right direction

I agree with you that Substance Designer from my point of view and what I want and do is a weird complex mess and inconvenient and not as easy and friendly to use filter forge, fr om the node based software I have tried already the one I like more and like a lot of things about it is filter forge that is the one that is much easier and better to use and learn, at least for me.

@kirkl13: sorry, nothing from your list will appear in FF4.

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Regarding layers export, that apparently didn't happen due to some SDK lim itation. As far as I remember, we had that feature request but it's just kinda shot down because they just can't.

Exactly.

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Last thing: in the end it comes down to just learning what you're using.

Couldn't agree more!

Right, there are definitely some things that the program can improve on, but in the mean time I kinda like to think that I can improve on what I make. (Just so I don't get bored of everything.) I'd also say it's mostly about finding a good workflow that just works. So the question just becomes "where in the chain do you put filterforge?" and especially for people like me who do texturing work more often. In my experience, I typically like to hand paint and put something "manual" about my texture, so I make a really simple base texture, render it out, and paint on top of it. Then I can either add detail by hand or make the necessary noise patterns in FilterForge to overlay. It's a build up process....

The other thing I kinda wanted to say was that if you ever see my filters, they render under 30 seconds (on my computer with 600x600 preview). I try not to upload things that'll take forever to render. While there are some special cases, I just don't want people experiencing awfully long render times with FF. So I kinda add little things like "preview" check boxes, where people can see renders without the detail layers. And otherwise I try to make it all useful as possible before submitting it to the library. I don't think everybody follows that philosophy but that's just my way of working out that "FF is slow" issue.

Come to think of it, I'm really on a tight budget... so when I'm asked for pretty high-end work I gotta do it mostly by hand. So FF (and other tools) do come pretty handy. Especially if you make a set of macros that you can just plug-and-play it'll help make filters quick for your clients.

I donno... I feel like I got a job because of FilterForge haha.