New user questions.

Hi,
I have just purchased a copy of Filter Forge after seeing the great filters produced by the community. Well done to everyone!.

I am thinking I may have jumped in a little too soon though. I am an experienced CG artist, I purchased Filter Forge to use for textures in maya and fusion. Am I correct in assuming there is no simple way to export separate diffuse/spec/bump/normal maps.

I have seen http://sjeiti.com/ffbatch/ which looks very useful but does not automatically output multiple diffuse/spec/bump/maps etc does it? Correct me if I am wrong.

The quickest workflow I can find at the moment is to Add Preset, select which map to render then update that preset, repeat for all required maps ( bump / spec etc). Then reselect each preset in turn and render. This is a very time consuming exercise, especially if tweaks and re-renders are required.

Surely all of the gurus out there must have developed a faster method?

I have read as many of the forum posts and feature requests as I could, I know this feature was requested over a year ago. Sorry if this has been asked a million times before, when is the eta for v2? Will this feature be included?

I am not adverse to a little scripting if that will speed things up.

What I would love is something that writes each pass to a mutli-channel exr?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Cheers
Mike

The FF batch is your best bet.

You create a bunch of presets on one particular filter and upload that to the site. It will spit out a redone filter with all the maps as presets and includes a batch file. All you have to do is double click the batch file, wait as everything renders (ms-dos prompt) and you're good to go.

Granted, this is a one-filter-at-a-time solution but it's better than stock. Plus, you can run multiple renders at once (fairly sure of this, I know it's inefficient though) so you can leave it to go overnight and come back and it'll all be done.