Filter Forge
an indispensible tool for the graphic and 3D artist
by Albert Kiefer

Recently I received a message via one of my feeds that Filter Forge was finally released for Mac OS X.
Previously only availbe for windows systems I have long eyed the special application with envy. The sheer possibilities of this seemingly small application are endless. As a visual designer this enables me a lot of freedom building up images.

Stand Alone and Photoshop Plug-In
Filter Forge is a procedural texture generator and Image manipulator in one app (or Plug-In) that has a tremendous flexibility. The advantage of the Plug-In is that you can apply filter effects directly to any image you are currently working on in Photoshop without having to resort to pointing Filter Forge to an image explicitly. The other advantage is that you can apply the effects to a selected area.

The advantages of the stand alone version are that you are not bogged down by Photoshop and several windows and that you can start to create your own filters from scratch.

Image Correction and Manipulation
Filter Forge can either do basic to advanced color correction or abstraction on any of your images (just create a workflow and save it with several presets) or it can combine the image information with very complex procedural calculations that turn images into fantastic pieces of abstracted, grunged up or plain funny works of art.




Incredibly powerful texture engine
For me however the most incredible power lies in Filter Forge’s ability to create stunning and versatile seamless textures that are very, very handy to apply as texturemaps in 3D software. The thing is that produral textures are a common sight in any 3D software nowadays but they sometimes generate such complex textures that rendering an animation slows down to a crawl due to time and time again calculating these complex procedurals every frame.

With Filter Forge you can create the same, if not much more complex and convincing textures and, once they are rendered to a tileable image file, you have a file that renders like lightning and even will behave better with anti-aliasing than some procedural noises ‚in app’ tend to do.

But Filter Forge does not simply spit out an image file. It even presents you with the options of generating normal maps, bump maps and specular maps and alpha channels of that same file. This way you have a complete package of images to put to use in you texturing project.



All of the above images are procedural without any additional image input.

Library Magic
When you get Filter Forge and open it up for the first time you cannot even start to comprehend how powerful this app actually is. So first thing I would advise is to rus over to their very extensive on-line libraries and grab presets from several categories. You can spend hours and hours just marveling at the incredible images and textures that are being generated by a very active user community and wich are free to download (you can even do that directly into you running Filter Forge app!)

Multi-core enabled
The node based system that Filter Forge uses to create its magic can bring down a modern computer if things get really complicated (but remember: it’s only once to render the image and then the resulting image renders blindingly fast in your 3D package of choice). So the developers have enabled multi-core rendering. If you happen to have more than one processor driving your machine you can put that extra power to great use here.


The node based system lays out steps in clear iconic building blocks.

Variations to go
Filter Forge comes in several flavors tailored to your specific preference or budget.

• Filter Forge Starter-1 Edition Mac ($ 9.-)
• Filter Forge Starter-1 Edition WIN ($ 9.-)
• Filter Forge Starter-3 Edition Mac ($ 19.-)
• Filter Forge Starter-3 Edition WIN($ 19.-)
• Filter Forge Starter-7 Edition Mac ($ 29.-)
• Filter Forge Starter-7 Edition WIN ($ 29.-)
• Filter Forge Basic Edition Mac ($ 99.-)
• Filter Forge Basic Edition WIN ($ 99.-)
• Filter Forge Standard Mac ($ 199.-)
• Filter Forge Standard WIN ($ 199.-)
• Filter Forge Professional Mac ($ 299.-)
• Filter Forge Professional WIN ($ 299.-)

Tags: 3D, Textures, Procedural, Graphic Design, 2D, Plug-In

Yesterday Grid Iron Software released version 1 of the asset tracking software for Mac and PC. Flow is a fantastic piece of software for keeping track of items that designers and illustrators, who use packages from the Adobe range of products and Apple’s and Microsoft. The one thing for me as a visual designer working in 3D that clinched the deal was compatibility . You can now even see the files, xrefs and everything a Cinema file is referencing. Great stuff.

I will add a review here soon...

In the meantime check out some clear introductory tutorials on their site.

Tags: 3D, Graphic Design