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[lords8n]

Texturing has just gotten 100X easier.

http://www.filterforge.com

With this tool I just created the following filter in around 15 minutes.
Keep in mind that the seamless texture images you are seeing below are a result of running the filter. In my "filter" you can modify the main color and the other colors of the texture are calculated from it. I also placed other changeable settings that allow you to alter the roughness, and many other variables.



Same filter, different settings:


This tool will do woods, bricks, metals, anything under the sun.
AWESOME!

[KnacK]

I just visited the web site.  All I can say is W0W!!!

[Spook]

maybe now i might get back into mapping if i make some newer colors that look better =]

[jitspoe]

Cool.  Too bad it's 300 bucks.

[Spook]

yep, no way i'm paying out of my jobless pocket

[Smokey]

too bad i had this 3 years ago, i was making those sick rock textures.


theres a free version, or was.

also, for GFX experts like s8n, they will give it to you for free if you submit a few filters

[lords8n]

lol "too bad it's 300 bucks"
That coming from a single man with a high paying job...wtf?

I'll beta for them and try to get it free.
If I can't then my married with children mortgage having in debt broke ass will probably buy it for $300.
I'll have to maess with it and see what it can really do.
It does much more than just rock textures...much much more.

There is no free version. Time limited beta is all.

[loial21]

MMM Yummy textures.

300 is a drop in the bucket Jitspoe. I would gladly sacrifice it if someone if devoloper or mapping devil would make a series...ahem *cough (Jitspoe or S8N) *cough *cough of new maps *cough.

Edit*After really looking at them, there are extremely vivid which reminded me of an acid trip. Where I spent a good 2 hours talking to several individual bumbs embedded in the textures at my home in St Louis, at 19. 

"I'm Peaking and I can't come down!"

[jitspoe]

I have mixed feelings about this.  It seems extremely tedious to create a reasonably convincing texture out of this.  I spent quite a while trying to do something as simple as making a new set of tile textures.  I never could get it to look right.  It always ended up looking too synthetic.  I got close to getting something that would work, but then my computer crashed with MACHINE_CODE_EXCEPTION again (still haven't pinned down what is causing that).

It really felt like an overglorified photoshop action script (you can script filters and whatnot in photoshop already, so this isn't really anything new).  Then I got to digging around on the site and saw a couple really impressive filters.  The "Wall Distressed Section 01" and "Yellow Rusty Wall Panel" in particular caught my attention.  I opened them up to see how they were done and discovered well over 100 filters were being used to create these.

I thought I'd try a little harder.  For kicks, I decided I'd do something that would take about 2 minutes to photoshop with a photosource.  Some gravel/stone siding, like you might see on the side of a trash can or water fountain in a park:



I can't tell you how long I spent on it, and it only involved about 20 filters.  I couldn't really figure out a feasible way to make stones not overlap with more than a couple different colors, so I just left it at that.  Most of the area is void of stones (just some Perlin noise with a couple shades of brown).  I also wasn't very successful at making them as round as I wanted, but they did turn out OK...



But why go through all that work when I can just spend 2 minutes and make this?


(also, why the hell can't I minimize the editor? )

I suppose it does have its place for those textures that you simply can't photograph or piece together easily with photographs.  The ability to create bump/diffuse/specular/normal maps is also really useful if you're making textures for a game that has realtime lighting.  Paintball2 doesn't have this.

Browsing through some of the filters on their site, it seems only about 1 in 100 would have any kind of practical use for textures.  The rest are more, "Oooh, pretty glowy/blobby things."  Which is fine, but not worth $300.  What would be cool is if this were free, and we could set up a nice GPL repository to make it easy to mix and match filters together.  Even cooler would be to have a system built into the game where you could distribute textures as filters so they'd only take up like 10KB instead of like 2MB.  Of course this isn't really practical due to the rendering time (and such a system is more of a pipe dream, anyway).

I guess I might keep tinkering with it.  It seems really limited.  There's some stuff you can do really easily, but other things take a ridiculous number of filters to even come close to what you want.  I can't figure out how to do additive blending, or dodge/burning, either.  I use lots of different blend functions in photoshop and I'm kind of lost without them.

[jitspoe]

Bleh.  Made a mediocre tile texture.

Another weird thing I noticed:  It wants to use a texture size of 600 and other bizarre values for tiled textures.  Um, anybody who is going to want tiled textures is probably going to want them for a game.  Any game is going to want power of 2 texture (512x512, etc.) so they can be used on 3d accelerated hardware.  What were they thinking?!  Maybe the version you purchase supports the resolutions you'd actually want...

And the noise generators offer contrast but no brightness.  This makes things extremely tedious if you don't want 50/50.  I'll probably send them some constructive feedback and maybe manage to score a free copy, but if this represents the final product, I probably won't use it.

[lords8n]

Nice writeup Jitspoe.
I'm going to steal it for my feedback...j/k.

If, in PS, you create a blank 512x512 drawing, then select Filter/Filter Forge it opens a 512x512 filter.

ps. I hadn't bought anything yet. I think, once you master the filters it would be fairly fast though.

[jitspoe]

Yeah, I discovered the photoshop thing this morning.  I was like, "I wonder what happens when I use the plugin version."  It's stupid that the standalone uses those weird resolutions and won't even let you select 512.  If you type it in, it tries to change it to something weird, like 200.  The other thing I don't like about it is the curves.  You have preset curves that you can tweak, but you can't just adjust the curves any old way like you can in photoshop.

[UNiBoNGeR]

have you guys seen the eye candy plugin for photoshop? It's really useful I just wish it had more filters for it

[Eiii]

MACHINE_CODE_EXCEPTION

[jitspoe]

That's helpful.

I tried submitting a filter today, but the application crashed and I ended up sending a bug report instead.

[jitspoe]

I submitted a couple filters.  If you submit 3 and they are used enough, you get a free copy.  I don't know how many times they have to be used, though.

Boring Brick: http://www.filterforge.com/filters/2030.html
Cheap Linoleum Checker Tile: http://www.filterforge.com/filters/2031.html

The first 2 variations I made, the rest are randomized.

I'm starting to get the feel for this.  I figured out how to do a bunch of blend functions, and you can link a curve directly into the noise generators, so that helps.

[lords8n]

I have a few here at work I can submit, but I can't send or receive filters because of my firewally.

I may transport them to my house, where I have a few more.

[jitspoe]

That's hilarious - if you scroll your filters off the side of the screen, a little button pops up that says, "Don't panic!"  Nice little tribute to Douglas Adams.

[lords8n]

lol I saw that earlier!

[jitspoe]

I made a new filter to simulate paint peeling up off of a rusty surface.  This one took a lot of work and uses over 50 filters, but I like how flexible it is.  You can select different paint and rust colors as well as the gloss of the paint and the type of peeling you want.  For example, you can have some of that old glossy paint that tends to bubble up and rust with rough edges, or those thick flakes of paint that split and fall off in chunks.

[jitspoe]

Perhaps you have some large rust patches, on maybe something made out of copper?

I'll have to put together a few more presets and submit it.  It's not perfect, but I think it looks pretty convincing.  I've found if you don't submit enough presets, it randomly generates them, which doesn't always end up looking good.

(Double post for size constraints).

[oli887]

wow man... PB texture will now be awsome. ...

[jitspoe]

I've submitted it.  It'll probably be about a day before it shows up.  All of my filters can be accessed here:

http://www.filterforge.com/filters/author6286-page1.html

[lords8n]

I submitted 3 earlier.
I'll post them when they show up.

[loial21]

He said Rust. What small world.