UI / work flow suggestions

Hi guys


Im a working 3d artist guy at a relatively large studio . So ive been subjected to a number of interfaces in my time
Ive only been messing with the stand alone version for about 30 min, and its pretty intuative .. so well done there !

a few things annoyed me right off:
1/ The initial automatic rendering when you start the application.

2/ The inability to mess with the automatic render settings to speed things up i.e preview render size ! (not zooming but actual pixels its rendering).

3/ Filter editor stuff:

- The left hand pane preview window here really needs to be able to be dragged and resized its really really really annoying trying to get a sense of what you are doing with such a small preview OR with a small section zoomed in..having to scroll about. Here some rendering settings would also be very very handy !

- Initially it feels like you want to actually slide the ui numbers on the node based editor .. rather than jumping to the left hand pane , it would be awsome if you could do it there ! ie , a small local roll out window appears with the relevant node settings.
If this i not doable i suggest docking this stuff in a right hand pane
and leaving the preview on the left..

- I loaded up an organic texture , and tried to get it to seperate the specular map, but all i could find was filter -> render maps -> specular strength map ... which rendered a flat grey ?? bump seemed ok

it feels to me that the lighting setings / hdri stuff needs to be unified with the filter editor some how.
It seems a bit disjointed at the moment ...

- ohh yeah also you cant minimise once your in the filter

anyway thats all i can think of at the moment,

hope that helps ,

this app seems like its going to kik arse (hey how about some gimp support ?)

Quote
darkmantid wrote: specular strength map ... which rendered a flat grey

I suppose you expected a colored specular map, but Filter Forge doesn't use colored specular, and you can't specify specular color directly. It is evaluated automatically, based on what material are you rendering -- metallic (colored specular) or dielectric (white specular). For metals, the specular color is taken from Surface Color input.

So the Specular Strength map simply defines how strong the reflection is in particular areas of your image.