review: filter forge 5

Price Basic Edition $149, Standard Edition, $249, Professional Edition $399 | company Filter Forge Inc | website www.filterforge.com

Can this texture staple still compete against Quixel?

Despite Filter Forge 5’s new features seeming solid, well tested and developed, they seem like enhancements rather than major new functionality. However, if you’ve been collecting frequent flyer miles in the Node editor’s Bomber, Brick, Tile and Pavement components, there’s good news: they’ve all received major overhauls, as well as new features to support them.

First introduced in Filter Forge 2, the Bomber component has become one of Filter Forge’s most popular features, as it has enabled people to create anything from game-textures to bokeh. It’s a super-controllable component particle sprayer that layers fractally – each layer being 2x smaller than the layer under it – and it can output in HDR, colour tints and provides controllable chaos.

Solving output issues

The new Bomber Plus component adds to this by lifting the set amount of particles from five slaves to 10, thereby opening for an infinite amount of particle types. It has also bulked up other functions, like individual particle customisation, nesting and slave component enhancements. Specifically created as a supporting feature to the Bomber Plus component, you can use the new Map Switch in whichever context you want, thereby solving a long standing output issue. If you’re familiar with Filter Forge’s node colours, you know slave outputs are a map, and hence, green. You’ll also know the Selector input of the existing Switch component is grey, and hence incompatible with the slave’s output. The new Map Switch node fixes this for the Bomber Plus and other functions by simply letting the new Map Switch accept connections from map components. The Brick, Tile and Pavement components have gotten some much needed TLC as well, with new Plus components sporting features and functionality.

Another beneficiary of the new Bomber Plus addition is the new Pixel Awareness node, which finally lets Filter Forge generate output dependent on exact pixel coordinates.

Workflow, not output

So how does it compare to the competition, like the Quixel and Substance suites? Very well. Filter Forge earns its place as a vital toolbox staple by making sure its strength is where it’s always been: ease and speed of generating any tiling textures ranging from cloth to nebulae.

However, it may be getting a little long in the workflow tooth from a texturing point of view. It’s still build texture, generate all maps one by one, save to file(s), refresh in renderer, rinse, repeat, as it generates 3D textures in tiles or (Photoshop) selections only. Substance and Quixel let you generate texture and detail (maps) directly onto your mesh, which significantly speeds up your workflow.

But is it worth picking up? Yes. You can easily tweak and import any of the 5K texture/filters in their library into the suites, and its flexibility and ease of use ensures it will be a toolbox staple for quite a while yet.

Filter Forge earns its place as a vital toolbox staple by making sure its strength is where it’s always been