The Top 3 Features You'd like to see most!

Yup, I figured it was about time we had a little survey.

All you lovers of the 'Feature Wishlist' forum, welcome! Please head over to the "Feature Wishlist Archive" and take your time to carefully browse through it, because I'm going to ask you to write down your top 3 of features you'd like to see most. If possible, please do share with us some of the reasons behind your choice...






Now, with that nailed down, I'm going to make a start. My personal top 3 feature's I'd like to see most are as follows...

1st Place
FF as a compositing-application plug-in, conforming to the emerging OpenFX standard, preferably.

Yup, this would totally rock IMHO, and would also take care of all our batch rendering and animation needs in one grand stroke. I'll keep my thumbs pressed! Btw, this takes all the first three spots in my book, so I'm going to continue with...

4th Place
Bomber components (i.e. particle placement components).

Unfathomably powerful. I'm already entertaining at least 50 filter blueprints using bombers in my mind... just... need... bombers...

5th Place
Redesign of the Randomizer to allow for more fine-control, including the ability to lock certain controls from randomization by default, and of course by user input.

This is waaaaayyy needed to make filters with more than 7+/-2 controls viable and usable. Alternatively, I'd also be happy with the following for my 5th place:

Fixed' and 'Proportional' options for gradients, i.e. options to make gradients independent of 'Size, pixels' and Image Aspect. [probably goes for some other components as well]

Damn, I'd love that!

Good idea Crapadilla.

1: 7.6 Gradient Components :: 'Fixed' and 'Proportional' options for gradients (i.e. options to make gradients independent of 'Size, pixels' and Image Aspect).
The need for this goes without saying really.

2: 5.2 Filter Browser :: Customizable 'MyFilters' category including sub-folders.
Because the goal here is to make finding filters easier maybe a better idea would be a tag based search that also works in the not-'MyFilters'. That would probably also skip having to go online to find a filter even though you've already downloaded it.

3: 6.2 Node-Network Editing :: Highlight outgoing connections of selected component.
This would really help for larger filters. Sometimes with a lot of connections that are miles apart, the only way to find the right connection is to zoom out and wiggle a component to make the connection move.

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"Damn you, stupid Mac version!"

Let them eat cake!

well, we've had, what, two updates now since the official release? yes, i was hoping it would come sooner too, but seems Mac is getting most of the attention at the moment. and we're nearing 4000 filters! ummm, can you say 'disorganized?', kids?

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StevieJ wrote: There's so much more that could be done.....Editor to create custom noise components....includes Dilla's Bomber/particle components, of course

Once we get bombers, there won't be much of a need for 'more noise' IMO, as we'll be able to easily contruct our own noises with these particle tools. Imagine hooking up a pyramidal or spherical gradient to a bomber, setting up random rotation and scale, and selecting a 'lighten' blend mode for the particles. You'd easily end up with something very similar to a curve-mapped cells or pyramids noise, only that you have more control over the individual shapes. That's your editor, and it's powerful!

Besides, there's a lot more to the seven standard noises than is apparent.

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StevieJ wrote: Has Vlad ever mentioned any future plans towards this???

Well, the best info we have about bombers is collected in this thread, I believe.

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StevieJ wrote: I still think that expanding the noise components (in addition to this) would be of particular use towards simplifying alot of filter concepts.....and maybe bypassing some of the speed issues that arise by having to manipulate the slower noise components.....

How would you like to see the noise components expanded? Got any examples?

[You probably know this thread where Vlad makes good points why new noise components might not be necessary.]

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Reiveld wrote: Just 1.... The ability to have multiple favorite 'folders'

You're disqualified. It has to be three!

1. Fixing some basic light and reflection rendering stuff.
Like better hdri adjustment, so you could control direction of lighting (offset). Better control over reflections and flat reflections (offset and angle, maybe scale
and load in a different reflection map)

Changing light conditions is ofcourse a very nice feature and if you do it you can take care of reflections. It would be nice to visually place the reflection. With flat reflections I mean you get like a window reflection on flat surface and changing the angle for different look. I would ofcourse love to have somthing like
AE plugin "ZbornToy" (nice example what you can do with realtime lightning and 2d maps (depth map and colormaps)). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOWiuLl5aeY

2. Importing vector grafic (.ai) Make text, custom patterns and shapes.

It would be nice to bake a tileble vector shape you done in illustrator into the filter so you can do that chainmail or whatever shape you need, without spending hours doing the simplest forms. Vector is small and can be scaled without pixilation so it should be nice to bake it into the filter.

3. FF as a compositing-application plug-in, conforming to the emerging OpenFX standard, preferably.

Yes I want to use FF filters in AE... even if it could take alot of time to render each frame.

Very close to get on the list is AO pass and posteffect pass after the "final output"(after height and reflection)So you can for an example do better bloom effects.

1. Ability to use plug-ins in after effects CS3, or some way to apply the filter to a video. That would just be awesome, and I know the film community is always in need of new fire/water/electricity etc. Some of the following effects seem like they were born just for video! Imagine these with video under them: Bright Dots - Scanline - The Ring Effect - Comic Book - Chocolate Factory
Each one of these alone could be an expensive stand alone plug in!


2. Mac Version. I use PC, my girlfriend uses Mac. She's a graphic designer, and she insists that the majority of the graphic design industry is mac based. And that no professional graphic design firm uses PCs. I tend to think there are some designers that use PCs, but it would seem that a majority of Filter Forge's users would be mac based.

3. Some simple shapes or functions, it takes a while in FF to make circles or rotate an image. There's so much power in many of the features, yet I feel so powerless all of a sudden when I want to make a circle! Perhaps the offset tool could include rotate and zoom?

4. (Oh Noes, I is cheating!) Dropdown menu with text in controls. I'de like to give people options like "normal, additive, multiply" instead of the vague slider it has now. Let me know if there's a way of doing this and if I'm just doing it wrong!