HU- Filter Forge Sale almost over...
McGyver
Posts: 7,085
I was gonna put this in a thread where Filter Forge was being discussed, but I can't find it anymore, so sorry...
Filter Forge has been having a sale (at their site) on the new version 5.0 for a while, but apparently there are only 4 days left... It ends on 1/20/16... I just upgraded from 4 Pro to 5 Pro for $54... If I had $179, I'd have upgraded to the lifetime upgrade... Maybe next time...
Currently the non upgrade prices are •Basic- $29 •Standard- $49 •Pro- $79 •Pro Plus (lifetime upgrade) $308
There are often sales, but the 80% off sale is pretty damn good, so figured I'd mention the expiration date before anyone who was on the fence about it missed out.
EDITED TO ADD- For anyone not familiar with Filter Forge, you DO NOT need Photoshop to use Filter Forge. It is equally useful and effective on its own as a STANDALONE program. I actually prefer to run it as a standalone application, as I find it quicker that way and I prefer to do whatever else I may need photoshop for later. There are a handful of filters that technically would make more sense to do in Photoshop, because were meant for use with a selected image (something separately selected with a layer), but this is easily circumvented using an external alpha image (image with transparent background), like a .png, which can be done in any good image editor like GIMP. Once I discovered that, I really haven't used Filter Forge within Photoshop once since. But I definitely suggest you have some sort of image editor, at least the FREE program GIMP, which is pretty damn good.
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Comments
This is a great deal, but is ultimately out of my budget because of the declining Canadian dollar :( :( :(
Thanks for the heads up. Picked it up.
Going to stick with 4 for now (the incentive to move to 5 right now doesn't fit my ROI), but it's definitely worth picking up on sale if you can.
...79$ for 5.0 Pro...auuuuugh. Wish I at least hit four numbers in Wednsday's Powerball or Megabucks.
Without hitting Lotto it's a no-no for me even at such price - pretty much as everything else nowadays really, so not a big surprise *sigh*
Well, at least once or twice a year they do have a really good 70% off sale... it's a very random thing... Well, from my perspective, as I don't keep track of it, but 80% was worth noting as I feel FF is a great tool... If anyone is interested in FF, but does not have the cash at the moment, I'd suggest two things, one download the free thirty day trial (but when you have the time to play with it) unless it's changed recently, it's full function... Two sign up for their newsletter and wait for a good sale.
It's more than worth the money, though if you don't have the money, it may as well give you immortality...
When you tally up all the textures you can produce, you're talking about hundreds of dollars of texture packages you don't have to buy.
How does it compare to Substance in terms of texture generation? I've always been waffling between the two products...
I don't own any of the Substance Suite, but from what I understand they are almost completely different from Filter Forge... The suite has three parts... Painter is a 3D painter (for 3D painting on a well mapped object), Designer is a procedural materials creation tool and B2M is an image to materials tool... What I'm not clear about is how useful they are independently, and it sorta seems like to really do anything meaningful, you probably need to own the whole suite. I don't know, but it seems like B2M and Designer are meant for use with Painter... Their product description sucks, as it seems to assume you are there to buy it and you already know all about it and all you need is a flashy video to nudge you over... I'm not a fan of trade show videos as more or less the only idea of what the product is... But that aside, I believe the full suite is far more geared towards 3D model texturing (than Filter Forge), that's if the materials will work with your render engine... And I believe it is geared towards PBR... It says it's supposed to work with iRay but I don't know how well... It also mentions iClone and Octane so DAZ users probably might get more out of it then Poser users... Also, if you really more or less need the whole suite for it to make sense, then you are looking at $400 for the Indy license (good for anything under $100k profits) complete package... Individually it's Painter for $149.00, Designer for $149.00 and B2M for $99... I'd love to try it, but I'm not even sure if there is a demo as I don't see anything that directly indicates one.
Filter Forge on the other hand is good for generating effects in Photoshop or making seamless tile textures... More old school texturing.
I hope that was all accurate and somewhat helpful.
Substance Designer came first and is similar to Genetica/FilterForge in that it gives nodes for cotrolling procedural or texture generators to produce an output - the big difference is that the output can be saved as a live material which can then be modified with Substance Player in supported content creation tools. B2M is a special substance for creating a tiling material with bump and diffusde etc. from an image - a bit like Image Synth mixed with Crazy Bump. Substance designer is a new application, and is for painting directly onto a model though it is in some ways more restricted than things like Mari or 3D Coat. I'm pretty sure most of the applications have a 30-day demo mode - I know I was able to try them out a bit before deciding to buy.
Yeah, I was referring more to B2M and Designer than painter itself -- in comparison to Filter Forge.
My takeaway is that Filter Forge is great if I do a lot of other Photoshop work, whereas Substance is good if I'm more into painting 3D objects?
Filter Forge is also good as 'massive grab-bag of tileable textures,' which is 99% of what I use it for. And for $60 it's provided me with textures it would otherwise take me a significant amount of time to find, assuming I could even establish usage rights, or several hundred dollars of textures packs. Make of that what you will.
Many of the FilterForge textures include bump and normal maps, which is awesome.
I took the plunge finally after finding this thread, unfortunately I waited till today (the last day!) and lost 5% of the discount as it seems to have dropped to 75% today instead of 80%, still I'd looked at it before and dismissed it as merely a program loaded with lots of filters and nothing else, should have researched more to see how useful it is for textures as well. Quite looking forward to diving into Filter Forge 5 somertime soon (if my current render ever decides to go past 87% converged!!!)
KA1: Yeah. I deleted almost $100-200 worth of texture bundles from my wishlist after buying FF. ;)
That's odd it's still saying 80% for me. I've been toying with the idea of buying this program for years so I just went ahead and bought it. I love fiddling with image editing/creation software so I'm sure I'll have lots of fun with it, even if I don't produce anything worthwhile for 3D work. There's lots of scope for making tileable textures for Iray shaders so I think that will be a good place to start. I'm also quite excited about the normal map creation features as I'm finding these work brilliantly with Iray, too.
Looks great, but must buy food.
I shall await the next sale unless the 80% off stays for a few more days
Food is overrated... Besides, according to the media all of it is bad for you... All of it... I say reawaken the skills our ancient ancestors left us... Go to the park and grab a couple of squirrels and some acorns... Squirrels are full of vitamin S and vital protobionutrioxidents and when stuffed with acorns and grass and slow roasted over a burning tire, they taste just like pheasant. And if you live in a big city, you can easily substitute rats for squirrel (rats has more vitamin R then squirrel but very little portfolioic acid).
I am going to recomend this filter from FF to give the most control over making a normal map from a black/white/grey height map. https://www.filterforge.com/filters/8536.html
I use Filter Forge daily for one reason or another.
Looks interesting, but of no real use when you do not have photoshop
Um, not true at all.
you can filter images, and you can generate textures, without PS.
Strange, it explicitly mentions that it is a photoshop plug in, rather than a standalone program
It's both.
I use mine as a plug in for PaintSho Pro. I don't have Photoshop either. It is definately also a stand alone, no other software required. Quote form home page, "Standalone software and a plug-in for popular graphic applications"
List of supported host applications, but you don't need anything else to run it.
https://www.filterforge.com/download/hosts.html
OK, thanks for the info, I am probably a bit late to consider it now, but definitely something to look at in the future. As a matter of interest, how good is just the base version? Or do you feel that the Standard (or Professional) is the minimum I should consider?
Here is the comparison chart. I'd say that the bump, diffuse, normal and other maps for the filters that support it, is really pretty important, otherwise you just get one map for the base color and that is it. I have had occasion to need maps over 3000x3000 too, like for making normal maps.
https://www.filterforge.com/buy/
It definately goes on sale a few times a year. Usually the 80% is only when a new version is coming out of the beta stage, but I've seen 50-70% much more often than that. Sign up for the newsletter and they will send you sale notices.
OK, thanks, I had seen the 3000x3000 restriction that I maybe could have lived with, but the lack of bumps etc is not, so Professional is the minimum I would want.
Definitely professional, for precisely the reasons you mention.
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Hyperspeed-Wallpaper-1920x1080-567687122
All the ship textures were from FF (they're really just simple primitives), as is the big glowy energy thing (Energy Ball filter).
You can peruse https://filterforge.com/filters/ , and it will show you various filters, random filters, and so on, just to get an idea of what you have access to.
You can also design new stuff, but I've never bothered -- I use it 90% as 'source of tileable textures with bump and normals) and maybe 10% 'hey, watercolor might look cool'
Hopefully DAZ will sell Filter Forge 5 Pro here like they did Filter Forge 4 Pro.
When I bought Filter Forge 3 from their site ( I forget which company did their billing but it was in Europe) I had a double billing issue that took awhile to get straightened out.
I got Filter Forge 4 Pro from DAZ with zero issues and at a great price when it got included in one of the crazy sales we have so often....so I'll wait and hope Daz sells 5 here too.
I amended my OP to include that FF runs independently of Photoshop and that Photoshop is not required.
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