In this post I want to discuss my idea of two outputs in addressing onyXMaster quote to a question of mine, "Unfortunately, Filter Forge does not allow you to connect the output of Root component (the only way to get "surface"-type filters) to any other components. This is a technical limitation of current rendering engine and is not easily to overcome (there are subtle, but challenging supersampling-related difficulties in the possible implementation, along with some conceptual UI issues). This _may_ be resolved in a future major version, with addition of separate shading components, but I would not hold breath for it.
So the only currently available option is to save the output of one filter (preferably to a lossless format if you have the Professional version, like 32-bit OpenEXR with PIZ compression), then load it as an input image and apply the second filter. Also, keep in mind that Filter Forge supports "actions" in Adobe Photoshop-compatible hosts (Photoshop itself along with ImageReady work fine, other hosts may be quirky since their not-so-compatible implementation of the plugin API spec), so you can apply two filters in one action, and then just reuse it (you may suffer from precision issues though if you use 8/16-bit images).
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. I know that we can not get an output from a surface rendered image, but what if we could do something easier. What if we had a way to just run two filters, one after another, and mask it so it "looks" like a single filter. It would take the exact same amount of time as running two filters, but it would do more. You wouldn't have to run a filter, save, and then run another filter as FF is currently, but with a double filter you would just run two filters, that look like one, and have a single rendered image without all the saving hassle.
The cool thing about a feature like this, is that it would spark even more creativity amoung the filter forgers and old filters would begin to be looked at in completely new ways. More unique filters would be created, radically new designs would emerge, and Filter Forge would prosper even more (note this is all hypothetical, and I have little experience in marketing and am merely trying to sell my idea
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What is your thought on my idea? Would two filters masked to look like one be a good thing, or not? Imagine what you could get by running Brain Jelly Cuisine with Comic Book, or Worm Craft ™ with Qbert 2.0. You have to admit, that would be pretty cool. What about Magma v.3.0 with Diamond Plate? It would be a pretty cool feature...
