filterforge unusable?

[super gnu]

so, i was searching for a nice desert sand and stones texture, search led me to the filterforge filter library on their website. lots of nice stuff there, id heard of it before, so i jumped in and bought it at their 80% discount.

regretting it quite heavily at the moment!

the software seems powerful, but of all the filters ive tried (about 6 so far) , only ONE would actually render out at a decent resolution. the rest got stuck at the start of rendering once i cranked up the resolution to a modest 4kx4k. i have waited over an hour but the rendering never starts. or, if i drop the res to under 3500x3500, i maybe get one bucket to complete before it locks up.

if i drop to 2kx2k it renders fine, but that is an awfully low limit for non-tiling quality textures.

this is the same for both the photoshop plugin and the stand-alone.

has anybody got experience if this software? any tricks to get the damn thing to render? really gutted i didnt try the demo first.

[Ihno]

Some of the filters are quite heavy and need some time to compute.
I remember making a 10k knit texture and had to leave it rendering over night.

You can setup the Antialiasing, go to Filter->Antialiasing.
I usually use 2x, it seems to be enough in most cases.
And I'm more after the singe texture maps than that beauty pass it produces by default... They render way faster.
Go to filter-> Render maps.

Also there are some settings about multi core usage and ram that may help.
I didn't had to use them and Leave it as it was.

Generally this thing is slow but it also can help alot, especially for making game Textures.

But I think i will buy Substance Designer to replace filterforge just when it supports a bigger resolution than 2k inside of Max.
I think Substance designer is much more advanced than filterforge.

[super gnu]

thanks for the reply.. but did you experience a massive delay before it starts actually rendering? will it start if i leave it? since at 2.5kx2.5k it starts after 10 seconds, but at 3.5kx3.5k it starts after 20-30 minutes, i assumed that at 10kx10k it would take about 15 years to actually start rendering, let alone finish.


the think i like about filterforge ( ive not even built a network yet, only had it a couple of days) is the 11,000 texture library that it comes with. that give some serious selection when choosing something to modify.

[Ihno]

Yes there is a delay but 20-30 minutes? I don't think i've experienced that.
Can you post the link to the filter you trying to apply so I can try it on my computer?
My Sytem really isn't very strong: i7 2600k@4ghz Hyper Threading is turned on - 23gb Ram.
But maby it is faster with FF than a dual xeon monster because FF maybe can't handle it.
Which version of FF are you using and on which Photoshop version?

Yes that library and the Philosophie to share all of them for free is something that I also really appreciate.

[super gnu]

im using the latest ff version (5)

the filter i last tried was this:

https://www.filterforge.com/filters/6715.html


which looks very nice for a procedural.


my system is a 3930k (6 core) at 4.6 ghz with 32 gb ram.

[Ihno]

ok that one is heavy ^^
40minutes without showing the status bar on ps5.5.. i'll kill the task now.
Will also give a try on the lates PScc.
Iam on the version 4 of FF

I would recomment to use Filterforge to get the Maps one by one. It'll be better to use them in vray instead of that baked default one anyway.
But to get the diffuse seems to be also a heavy task. 10min without status bar until now...

[super gnu]

yes i only want bump, maybe normal, and diffuse. but all of the layers seem basically un-renderable above 2.5k. its a heavy one, but all the filters ive tried (all similar ground textures admittedly) are all dog slow like this.

[Ihno]

I usally generate at 4k and some of the filters need an hour. Can't remember ever touched one that heavy... But maby i just abort it and moved to another one. There must be something in there which can't handle that resolution. Unfortunately that is the bad about having 11k filters, i never had to get deep into the wiring.
You can get the height and the diffuse in a acceptable time if you change the "Result" node in the filter editor to simple and wire the hight or the diffuse to the only remaining source input.
I think the bump is at least almost identical with the hight. And you can use the NVIDEA plugin or xNormal to convert that into a normal map.

FF isn't that bad as you now propably think. All the filters in the Libary where made by customers and some of them are just badly done. But yes it is slow when it comes to higher resolution and it should be way better..

[soulburn3d]

I think Substance designer is much more advanced than filterforge.

Its not more advanced, its just different. Substance has a lot of procedural noises that Filterfoge doesn't, and Filterforge has a lot of noises that Substance doesn't. So if you want the full spectrum, you kind of need both.

I've never had any issues with filterforge, although most of my maps tend to be 2k. But certainly some of the filters are slow, especially if they contain a lot of loops in the network. it may be worth going into that network, strip away some parts of it, and see if it speeds up, perhaps the part that's slow isn't even needed for your purposes.

- Neil