I’m kinda having trouble believing it - but FilterForge is being offered at 80% off the regular price, and the banner says “1 day left!” (at the time of this writing). $79 for the Pro version?!? Yes, please!
isn´t it redundant now because Ndo2, DDO and Substance Designer exists?
and then there is this old tool here too http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/
I haven´t seen a cool Video on their website showing off Filterforge and what it all can do, their site looks a bit dated…
are you sure they are not trying to blend people by their huge sale sign? 
I think that banner is misleading because it’s been saying that for a few weeks at least. At least that’s what the banner read when I downloaded it a few weeks ago. Haven’t had much of a chance to play with it yet, but it looks like it could be a useful tool.
Lol, yeah, I dunno what it said a few weeks ago, but today it says “75% off”. So least yesterday they were being serious. 
It’s up to $99 now.
“blend people”?
I still like MaPZone, but it’s becoming obsolete. I no longer have any appreciation for Allegorithmic, and at this point they seem to be letting MaPZone completely expire, what with the tutorial images and links disappearing.
I won’t be investing any money in Substance Designer or their other products, so I went looking at some other tools I thought about purchasing long ago. FilterForge is pretty powerful, but it’s got a learning curve. I’m still on the fence about buying it, but I just might 
The only reservation I have about getting Substance Designer is that they seem to be suiting it more for the creation of game textures rather than textures for rendered images (4x4 is the maximum size which is somewhat small for the pricetag).
I also haven’t seen much indication in the docs. that it provides as much of a low-level control over the procedural generation as MapZone did. Considering its possible expiration in a few years, if the guy behind the FOSS app. known as Neo Texture Edit doesn’t step up his game, we may very well see the death of good-quality freeware options designed for texture making.
I was thinking out loud while being a user of one the available pbr capable game engines.
outside of game engines it could be interesting to buy…
FF is a great plugin - it is sort-of a super plugin that is very useful for all kinds of work, not only texture generation. There are tons of image effects as well, so it an excellent general purpose toolkit to have in your workflow.
Need a quick nebula for your (space) game? Done - many generators for that in FF. A good b&w conversion of your photo work? Done. Again, many different variants in FF. Abstract pattern for your client presentation tomorrow? Done. Quick image distortion for your composition? You got more than 600 different distortion effects in FF.
With this one plugin you’ll be consigning most of your other effect/filter plugins to the scrap heap.
Yes, they really reduce it that much from time to time, but their advertising is misleading. Sometimes they say “reduced only 3 days left” and then they keep it for weeks.
Filterforge is really effective if you need some effects quick, there are pre-made templates for almost everything. But to me it looks like more a general purpose filter software, since the texture creation abilities are not that good in most filters you can download.
You can try it for free and if you want it, just wait for some offer where they reduce it, they do it a lot, there is almost no need to buy for full price.
“Not that good” is a pretty subjective thing to say. There are some seriously impressive custom procedural textures that people have contributed to the library. I would beg to differ that it’s primarily a general purpose filter software, since it’s a standalone application with tons of texture generation utilities. One can use the Photoshop plugin for mere photo filters, but the power of the software is the standalone application. One might as well say that Cycles nodes aren’ that powerful because all they’re really useful for is mixing BSDFs together.
Maybe I expressed myself a bit wrong, I meant the material creation abilities, like normal maps, specular maps etc that are needed for rendering engines, the textures themselves are fine. I hoped to be able to replace material generation software with it, like CrazyBump etc but the filters I got were not really useful and most people designing filters do not care so much about proper normal, specular etc maps.
Owner of FF3 pro. Filter Forge is not so great: for example, it cannot natively create normal maps (like my other program, Genetica, does), you have to create the normal map creation network by hand.
Personally, as soon as I will have spare change, I will get Substance Designer indie which, from what I saw, is the most powerful of the three.
FF is on sale ~50% of the time and FF developer are on a spaceship flying at relativistic speeds since often their “last day” last a week for us “stationary observers” <sarcastic grin>.
Actually you can do it easily when using advanced surface output. It is the rendering height map with ao, normal, spec etc. All you do is plug some black and white image map to height output, and the in top menu you select Filter-> render map -> normal
This is only if the filter has been designed to be used with that and then only with the settings the author has specified, otherwise you will have to invest some more work and design the node setup by hand or use one of the pre-made normal map filter, which are not as good as specially designed software for this.