Not sure if I need v4 upgrade or not
... not to upload things that'll take forever to render. While there are some special cases, I just don't want people experiencing awfully long render times with FF. So I kinda add little things like "preview" check boxes, where people can see renders without the detail layers. And otherwise I try to make it all useful as possible before submitting it to the library. I don't think everybody follows that philosophy but that's just my way of working out that "FF is slow" issue.
Come to think of it, I'm really on a tight budget... so when I'm asked for pretty high-end work I gotta do it mostly by hand. So FF (and other tools) do come pretty handy. Especially if you make a set of macros that you can just ...
What was to be...
...
Because the original filter took a total of 9 minutes to render!
Yep... it took 2 minutes for the first pass, and another 7 minutes for the anti-aliasing. :(
I already read in another post, where a filter was rejected for taking too long to render, and it wasn't even as slow as this one, so I knew I needed to speed mine up.
Unfortunately, I ended up with a really 'dumbed-down' version of my original intent.
The part which truly bothers me the most though, is that the anti-aliasing is what took so long... and it ...
Animated Pseudo-Depth Spiral by Andrey Mironov
Author: SpaceRay. As I still find it slow, I have used the time multiply available inside of GIF Maker and have put 3x Speed and now really is what I wanted really to have
So to be clear, this one is the same 45 frames rendered above with 3x speed in GIF Maker
The quality is low because is the only way to put it under 1GB for the forum
Instead of GIF Maker you. may use any of the many other GIF or video editors available.
Mondrian by Skybase
... rectangular images and does not show the black backgrounds as above, I have made also this other example that uses full filled textures.
Like much all the possible that could be done with this filter, and also I like that is very fast too, considering how slow is FF many times, because to render a 2000 x 4000 result only takes 23 seconds.
"Frostbitten".....jffe tribute filter :)
Author: jffe. It's coming along. I have pretty good control of the amount of detail/fracturing in a way now, and 2 settings for my gap-undoing technique. It's somewhat slowrendering considering the max refraction setting is 1, and there's only one blur with a max of 1 (and it's only feeding into a source), and 2 noise distortions with 0 for detail/roughness. Not sure what's up with that, but maybe I can find a way to speed ...
rotated polaroid by Sjeiti
Author: Sjeiti. True... let alone slowing down the rendering speed :-)
But some degree aging (http://www.sorabji.com/foundcrap/2005/ice_in_a_strainer.polaroid.jpg) does make it more realistic. Don't worry I'm just going to try and scratch it a little.
I had already put in a slightly darker edge around ...
Just slow...........
... a filter and waiting for it to render the thumbnails. Its ok if you've waited for that particular filter before, but if you havent, you may as well make a cup of tea, especially if you want to test out more than one new effect.
Little things that slow things up. Noticably. The waiting for thumbnails to renders the worst, but the laggy interface is also noticable, though not as frustrating.
I hope thats useful feedback
AaronC
FF is slow and tired of waiting? Get the new AMD 64 cores computer now
... computer, AMD has made an arrangement with a computer company and hardware manufacturers to be able to make a new 64 cores computer
A450-AMD Interlagos Workstation Quad CPU and up to 64 cores and 2 GPUs
If you are tired of waiting for Filter Forge to render the result on your computer, upgrading to this computer will surely be much faster :D
Instead of one Quad core you will have a Quad CPU :D
And FF Inc. has confirmed that FF 4.0 will have the same render engine and same speed as FF 3.0
...
LAB#3015 Skybase
... as a light gel. Pretty handy for scenery with stuff like this all over the place.
This diffuse pass took 33.30 seconds to render. Not bad. ;)
The catch with this filter is that the work comes out abstracted and not really specific. When you look ... ... give it. I do have another filter wh ere I made it so that the framing follows the contours of objects but it unfortunately is slow and quite honestly I thought it wasn't worth it since you'd rather produce the line work, color work by hand. Much much easier....
Error Diffusion Dithering
Author: Rachel Duim. My take on this: pixel by pixel manipulation is not a strong suit in FF. You can do a lot with LUA (fractals for instance), but the limitations on LUA make it slow. FF only uses one core when running LUA (not thread safe). And being procedural, the LUA function you create gets called for each block rendered. I also find it is not the easiest to debug and crashes occasionally when in the filter editor. My 2 cents, 3 with tariffs.
just a general Kudos here
Author: Firemup. I like the program also. This is all new to me and I'm not familiar with all the tech terms but actually enjoy trying to create a filter.
Rendering has been very slow but I found the cure re: file delete/rename. I haven't opened the program today, but am looking forward to getting back to it. There have been a couple of bugs I submitted but I was and am still able to use it.
Thanks.
Firemup
Suggest a new filter.
... reaction diffusion part of the code.
The speed of a full render is very size dependent. Previews (and 600x600) are not too bad (all under 2 minutes) and FF caching speeds up some previews to under a minute.
I am on the fence about releasing it. Large renders (over 2000 pixels) take quite a while if you have less than 4 cores in your CPU. I am doing more testing on my slow & fast CPUs today.
Should I release it with a warning about the speed on older (1 or 2 core) CPUs??
Is there an quivelent to Photoshop's 'Auto Levels' and/or 'Equalize'?
... in the preview when it renders the picture). A histogram of a single block is useless for auto-levels, you need the whole picture.
Even if Filter Forge had a way to calculate a histogram of an entire image, filters that use this would be painfully slow and completely non-interactive -- you wouldn't see anything in the preview until the histogram is rendered.
So, to my regret, the current architechture of Filter Forge does not allow histograms and therefore auto-levels to be implemented.
Ways to Reduce Your Render Times
... say, turn it off.
Also have to know and be aware that most of the presets already have stored the AO and AA settings (http://www.filterforge.com/forum/read.php?FID=5&TID=10155) and they can be on or off, or can be high settings and so have a very slowrendering, and there is no way to override this unless you change it manually each time, which can be done for preview and test purposes and then when render the final image you can activate again them for the high quality you may need or want.
RENDER ...
LAB#3015 Skybase
... the filter. It's 2 minutes to render this small image, I can't imagine anybody caring to render huge images using such a filter. And unfortunately I just don't know if I ever will myself.
In the end when I see arguments about how filter forge is slow, it bothers me that I prefer not to upload filers that take long to render. It's been a major deterrent to me uploading any "highest quality" filter thus far.
Oh well. Anybody want this? PM me. mmn... nah. I'll upload it when I feel like it.
Render Times in Editor
... "jffe wrote:
It's all kind of moot once ya halfway know what yer doing though, and if they read the wiki and all, they would have 1/2 an idea of what takes the most render-time right off the bat."
Thats true to a point except when you use slowrendering component or combinations it would be great to be able to adjust the roughness, detail etc to lose the least amount of the effect you desire but optomize the speed and to have that direction control rather than - adjust - save - open - adjust ...
Plating texture by Igotaway
Author: jffe. It's a fairly simple design, but I like it. :) There's 3 unused components in it, a Stones & Perlin Noise going into a Blend, none of which go anywhere and can be removed. Other than that, it's still pretty slow, you might lose a Perlin Noise or two and just double them up, cause at such a tiny size (600 X 600) all that detail is lost anyways. You could probably halve the render time. Just a couple ideas.
jffe
Workspace Rendering Times
Author: Kraellin. you know, i still think this is a good idea. but you dont base it on the component; you base it on how long that component preview/thumb image took to render. you could even do it as a component where you simply inserted the 'Time' component into your algorithm anywhere you wanted and it would simply return a value. it would be a good way to debug a slow filter or speed up an average one.
Circuit Board - Printed by LilBlueSmurf
Author: LilBlueSmurf. If I understand right, extra doesn't affect the render, just makes the filter file a bit bigger. That was just some experimenting to get copper coils, more for old style boards, but I forgot it was in there when I submitted. ;) It's really pretty slow no matter what with all the blurs offsets and feeding things into everything to attempt to eliminate overlapping objects. It can be sped up a lot if you don't worry about that. :(
Speed of filter processing – FIXED
... consider acceptable time wise?.... "
So ok, what's a nice render time? To me, 30 minutes IS OK. 15 hours is when you wanna start thinking about taking a filter apart and manually achieving a portion of the effect. Honestly, I'm too used to seeing slowrenders across many programs. I am a mo-graph designer, 3D artist... so on. ;)
This is pretty relative so to me, what you think is acceptable is your standard, but the software also does have it's intentions and purposes. Programs are, after all, built ...
