Working on Shapes Tutorials

So I am starting to work on tutorials on how to create shapes...I am going over from using the standard shapes components to building with 3d shapes...Including samples and how to make the filters....It will be a long one.....There will be many sections........Any requests?

Always glad to help the learning process.. Those will be in the tutorials as well... They are going into a pdf that I will upload to fileden or another service...Then I will post the link here for downloading....
I was going to do video but might be easier as pdf....The files won't be as large...
btw that mushroom is one of the tutorials..

Quote
Mardar wrote: I have already learned a lot fr om the snippets you posted the other day in a different link

I want these, where are they? Pleeeeeeeeeezzzzz?
Can you post a link to that other link? Thanks!

Thanks Mardar

When you say 3D shapes, you mean with bezier curves?

Thanks CFandM! I am looking forward to those myself!

It does not matter that it will take some time to make it, take your time and we will waiting for your great guide and wanting to learn from you.

At least we know something is getting done for learning how to create shapes which already is a good news.

CFandM thank you so much for a great start to shapes. Your instructions are very clear and even I could understand what you were showing me. I will be trying your example filter so I can get use to connecting all the components and begin to understand how this all works. I'll be looking for your next installment. Thank you again for doing this for we "filter challenged".

Thanks CFandM!
I will be studying this very intensely.

Just to let you know it seems to all be there.11 pages of 11.

Quote
Rod_D Wrote.. Thanks CFandM! smile:) I will be studying this very intensely. Just to let you know it seems to all be there.11 pages of 11. smile:)

You are welcome and have fun with this..More to come sometime..

The app that I was using to create the pdf was cutting off the text for the settings to the bowtie...So I had to move it up just a tad then it worked.....

You are also welcome Ghislaine..Anything to help..

Oh my, looks better than I expected

Here's the part which does the radial projecting around the non-circular shape:

Yeah, I get that alot...

I found another clever way to change and configure shapes in the Sketchy Painting filter by emme

http://www.filterforge.com/filters/8847.html

Here is a better comparison between using direct connection and alpha channel

Here is the color control connected directly to the rectangle component and as you can see the shape result is not clean and clearly defined

Although this could be seen as something bad, perhaps what you are looking for is this result and not a clean one.

Another shape of different lines done with the Noise Gradient

And perhaps you may think that the above is not very interesting or useful, BUT:

What happens if you put this cross lines shapes INSIDE a filter to DRAW with this shape?

For example I have used here the Paint Chips filter by b15fliptop and ONLY replaced the square shape of this filter with the cross lines of the shape I have created above and the result is :

Actually a couple issues here that I should note since I think there's a better way to do this really. And do mind, this post will be slightly be off topic, and in the genre of being something more about how to keep stuff clean and smart workflows to avoid creating more nodes to do something.

Generally, anything you do is acceptable in FilterForge. If it works, it's ok for you. But for the sake of render times, usability, and not shooting yourself in the foot... there's the "dos and dont's" on the FilterForge wiki. But not everybody is on the same page with that. It's expected, especially with a fairly technical program like this.

I'm assuming what SpaceRay's doing here is a demonstration of utilizing alpha to remove certain parts of the rectangle node.

The reason why this works is because the image feed or alpha feed is going directly into the "start x (and y)" slot which basically changes the coordinates around based on the map input (which is the image.) That's why the image appears. The issue with doing this is that it doesn't always work. Start XY Coordinates change based on images = the starting X Y point of the rectangle can change based on what the value is, hence it leads to "not so great" results since all you're doing is offsetting some stuff around. On the flip side, this can be beneficial if you're trying to make specific shapes, and maybe this IS the right way of doing it. Well, you know better about the filter you're making than I do.

I think feeding colors into some map inputs is inefficient There's really no rule that says "don't," and sometimes I do it because it's just convenient, but in many cases it leads to unexpected results. Feeding grayscale values is probably better since we're dealing directly with 0s and 1s. Hence you can expect results to come out just as you need it. In the cases above you have coordinates which are numerical, which means color input may result in unexpected results.



And the one thing that caught me was the use of the color control to input images. That's generally reserved for importing multiple images into 1 filter so if you're dealing with 1 image, just use the image component unless you have a really really really good reason to use that instead.

If you just have 2 shapes you want to put on top of each other, you can save yourself a blend component by just feeding the first component into the "background" of the 2nd component. This doesn't work if you want some special blend to happen in between, in that case, you should use the blend component.



Loads of stuff here, sorry of a huge post. I hate huge posts. But yeah, there you go. Some more hints on making stuff.

Quote
Skybase wrote: Actually a couple issues here that I should note since I think there's a better way to do this really.

Of course that you can contibute and you can tell if there are BETTER ways to something, and will be very welcomed, because I do not own the truth and I am just learning, so any help will be good specially from somebody that have experience and know much about it.

Quote
Skybase wrote: Generally, anything you do is acceptable in FilterForge. If it works, it's ok for you. But for the sake of render times, usability, and not shooting yourself in the foot... there's the "dos and dont's" on the FilterForge wiki. But not everybody is on the same page with that. It's expected, especially with a fairly technical program like this.

I agree that even if it works could not be acceptable from the usability, efficiency and search for best perfomance and render speed. And perhaps not everybody could agree to some rules, but is true that there are surely better ways than others to do things, and I am open to them.

Quote
Skybase wrote: I'm assuming what SpaceRay's doing here is a demonstration of utilizing alpha to remove certain parts of the rectangle node.

Yes, you are right, I found this interesting and perhaps useful.

Quote
Skybase wrote: If you just have 2 shapes you want to put on top of each other, you can save yourself a blend component by just feeding the first component into the "background" of the 2nd component. This doesn't work if you want some special blend to happen in between, in that case, you should use the blend component.

OH, thanks for the suggestion and the advice, is very to good to know it and is true that is much better your way to mix two sources instead of using the blend IF IT IS NOT really needed.

Quote
It would ONLY be needed if you want to have some kind of opacity difference between both results BUT for this one is not needed at all, want 100% opacity for both.

You can change the alpha value via color on either of those free rectangle components and achieve simple blending.

Also if you use HDR values you can offset start coords more than values between 0 and 1. You can input negative values too. Once again, color inputs into coord value = avoid as much as possible.

And as before if you use this new shape created and adjust a little the setting, you can then use it inside another already built filter, again I use the Paint Chips as above.

So this the result you will get replacing the square chips for this new Techno created shape

And here is the result again using the Paint Chips fliter as the shape host

And here you can see even better the shapes combined in bigger size and see better the real effect