CompuServe Thread

Got my copy of Forge yesterday. This is one of the coolest programs I've used in a long time. For those of you that have never heard of Forge, it's a texture editor designed for use with the Essence texture packs for Imagine. (Impulses textures don't seem to work with Forge.) Forge will allow you to load up to 9 Essence textures at once for editing. Each texture loads into it's own layer and it's display can be toggled off or on or you can use the textures fade control for a more subtle look. More than 1 texture can be displayed at a time and you can get some pretty interesting results by mixing textures. An example of this would be to load a brick texture, a fractal noise texture, and the pitted texture, each to it's own layer. You turn on the brick texture and turn the other 2 off. Adjust the size and color of the bricks and mortar as well as the depth of the mortar groove. Next you go to the fracatl noise texture and turn off the bricks layer. Here you adjust the size, contrast and noise color. Then you go to the pitted textures layer, turn off the noise layer and adjust the pitted texture to your liking. Now you can turn on the other 2 textures to see a pitted brick wall with fractal noise. Each Essence texture has a fade control to set how much it will affect the rendered surface so you could turn the noise texture or pits down for a more subtle look. You can also adjust textures while more than 1 is being displayed. Once you're happy with the look of your surface you can save it as an Imagine attribute file or as an image for use with LightWave or Real 3D. Images are saved as 8 bit greyscales or 24 bit color pictures. Iff, JPEG, Tiff, and PPM image formats are supported. Forge can generate a repeating pattern that will tile without showing seams or it can distort the image so that it will look un-distorted when wrapped onto a sphere. Textures can be previewed on a flat plane or a sphere and they can be previewed with shading to show altitude effects or no shading for making imagemaps. All texture settings are adjusted with sliders, and once you make an adjustment Forge will start to update the texture display. When it updates the display it does multiple passes, starting with a very coarse render that gets more refined with each pass. This works very well for adjusting textures since you can often tell if the adjustment did what you want by the time it's rendered the first or second pass. Another interesting feature is the ability to make and edit animated textures. Each layer of Forge has a 'start' and an 'end' keyframe. You can edit both of them at once for a non-animated texture, or edit them seperatly and have the texture morph from the start to the end settings. ALL texture settings can be animated. There's a storyboard option that will let you preview the animated texture, and when you're happy with it you can save the surface as an Imagine attribute or a series of images. Other notable features include the ability to iconify Forge to free up chip ram while rendering images, an Arexx port, and the ability to run the program in 8 bit mode on an AGA machine or one equiped with a 24 bit display card. If you do 3D animation you'll want to look into getting Essence 1 & 2 and Forge. If you already have Essence, you definatly need Forge. How much will this programming masterpiece cost you??? >>>> $30.00 <<<< That's right, all this for 30 bucks! Steve Worley told me the idea is to make Forge cheap enough that everyone will want it and they can make more money selling Essence. :^) Forge is available from Apex Software Publishing @ 415-322-7532 Jeff H…