Filter Forge 9 Released

Good news everyone:
https://filterforge.com/more/news/1100.html

If you are into filter making, feel free to play with the new PBR Surface filter type.
If you are not, we hope you'll enjoy giving names to presets!

Both paid and prize license keys for 9.0 have been sent out – please check your inbox and spam folders.

Installed and key entered no problem. Unfortunately FF9 locks up when I attempt to use the editor, either create new filter or edit existing. I have Win 10. All seems good otherwise.

I've just reloaded previous versions 8 and 4 and I can't use the editor in those either whereas I could before, although it's a long time since I tried. Maybe it's an issue my Win 10 setup (?). I have a Pro licence. I must say, FF9 loads so much faster and processing is really quick too. Could use some advice with the editor issue if anyone can help.

Sorted my editor error. Just had to delete everything in Users/[username]/AppData/Roaming/Filter Forge 9/

Simple really.

Hello.
I have been doing some quick testing on the new PBR thing, and although is a huge step in the right direction, I would like to provide my feedback as a long time FF user and PBR texture artist.

1. Unless I am missing something, normal and hight map are obtained from the same source, which is a mistake since displacement information may or just should not be in the normal and the other way around. The current approach keeps the artist from controlling surface shape and high frequency detail.

2. There are missing outputs such as Ambient Occlussion.

What I would like to have is a separate input for normal and hight maps, and see some added such as Ambient Occussion.
Also, an optional output that is ignored in the material rendering by FF but allows you to plug whatever map you'd like to have, such as the "Mask Map" for Unity's HDRP materials wich is a mix of smootnes, metallic, AO and detail map mask in the RGBA channels.

I am open to help in whatever you see fit.
Also I promise to write "height" the right way now on.

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dactilardesign wrote: 1. Unless I am missing something, normal and hight map are obtained from the same source, which is a mistake since displacement information may or just should not be in the normal and the other way around. The current approach keeps the artist from controlling surface shape and high frequency detail.

This is a great bit of feedback, thank you.

Earlier last year we had internal discussions about Displacement, but we couldn't decide how to do it right, so we decided to skip it for FF9.0.

How would you prefer Displacement to be implemented in FF? I presume, that would require two separate inputs, e.g. Height-For-Normals and Height-For-Displacement. Would they both affect the rendering of Filter Forge previews? And, if so, how exactly? Should Height-For-Normals affect only the Normals but not Occlusion? And should Height-For-Displacement affect both Normals and Occlusion? Please let me know your thougts on this.

When you say

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that could be of use to other users of FF

you mean "any other FF user that uses Unity 2019 PBS?"

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How would you prefer Displacement to be implemented in FF? I presume, that would require two separate inputs, e.g. Height-For-Normals and Height-For-Displacement.

Right

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Would they both affect the rendering of Filter Forge previews? And, if so, how exactly?

They should. But displacement is really hard to see from a top 2D perspective, since the goal of displacement is to occlude pixels using height information thanks to the camera perspective. The only way to show displacement would be a meterial viewer similar to the Spherical Desplacement and it may be ignored in standard ortographic preview.
https://filterforge.com/filters/10856.html

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Should Height-For-Normals affect only the Normals but not Occlusion?

No, the way you've been calculating AO based on normal has been great. My filters from FF 4.0 have an AO spor on.

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And should Height-For-Displacement affect both Normals and Occlusion?

Yes. Displacement should affect AO the same way as bump does, although compared to normal displacement is always a low frequesncy - big scale height information.

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GMM we hope you'll enjoy giving names to presets! smile:)

That would have been nice, I mean, YES!

There may be, I can only talk about Unity riht now.

Back to the tessellation, I did a test with the filter "aged stone tiles PBR" with it's first preset, and this filter has a very low frequency and soft height map:

When using 128x128 sized height texture (only change from one example to the other) it looks more natural than the 512x512 height map version, since being 128x128 kills all the small detail and at the same tesellation level looks better (height maps don't need to be high res for this very reason, like AO).

So it is very important to provide a height map input (may be optional) for the output node in FF so you can fine control it.