Full Release of HueForge v0.7.0
It's been a long time coming
As per usual - something went wrong at release. This time though, it was not on me. Apparently my Digital Downloads app was unhappy with the number of you there are and decided to crap out when sending emails to all the Personal Users. Of course it’s the one group that hasn’t been getting regular Beta emails. This has since been rectified and all users who are on the new downloader should have gotten an update email.
Those who still have not updated to the new downloader, really should do so, so they can get v0.7.0. If your most recent order number is below 9217 you need to follow these instructions and get the new downloader. You will get that email. If you don’t know your most recent order number, but didn’t get an email - odds are you are below #9217. If you ordered in June or July and never rebought for free following the link, you are on that list.
I just joked with someone it might be easier to tell you what stayed the same between v0.6.5 and v0.7.0 but let’s try for a feature list.
Frontloading the Additions
Color Pop is added. (Here is a tutorial I will definitely be updating) Originally intended for black and white images with a “pop” of color. It is actually useful for more images than that. The parrot image above was created with Color Pop as the blue of the wings was close enough to gray (and far enough from red) to be able to be set as Color Pop.
Color Aware is significantly better. (Tutorial is in the works)
The Gradient indicators (especially in the middle) have been added to help show what the current color stack looks like. Both to help visualize how the sliders work and to show, especially for modes like Color Pop and Color Aware how the colors are arranged in vertical space.
The central gradient in particular is going to become a much more important tool and allow a lot of control functions that currently take room elsewhere. I have big plans here.
Sliders can be enabled/disabled by clicking on the button below them.
Colors can be dragged from the swatch below the slider to other sliders. Especially useful in the color modes where you reuse colors often.
Filament Library can be filtered by entering text in the Filter box (Alt+F on Windows). This makes searching filaments MUCH faster.
Undo/Redo is functional for many operations. Bugs are expected. Sometimes you need to undo multiple times for what should be a single operation, but generally it works. Loading/reloading a project resets the Undo Stack.
Mesh modification speed has been greatly increased and manifold issues hugely reduced.
Adjust Amount values have been changed from numbers to descriptors. Coarse, Medium, Fine. Affects both the Bright Adjust and Power sliders.
A LOT more Brightness Compensation modes have been added.
Brightness Compensation graph has been added to help visualize the effect. The X Axis (and gradient) is the “Luminance” value. This is in quotes because Luminance means something totally different in Color Pop and Color Aware. The Y Axis is vertical mesh height.
Brightness Compensation now has a Power slider (2.0 is equivalent to what it was in prior versions). THIS should be your new method for dimming/brightening images, the Bright Adjust Slider should be left alone. Fine adjust mode with the Power slider is the most powerful, fine grained, and effective method of brightening/dimming your results.
Spike Removal is added and will help smooth out those spikes from background removal etc. If Full Range is on, the mesh will resize after spike removal to take advantage of the extra space.
In Color Pop mode, the Negative button becomes a Split Image button. The bottom section ONLY becomes negative, the top stays positive. This allows partial Lithophane, partial Filament Painting images.
The Normal Button becomes 3 controls in the Lighting Dock which separate out the color blending model from the Lithophane/Filament Painting mode. Meaning you can view your model front lit/back lit/slicer view as desired. Clicking the Mousewheel still previews Slicer View.
You can sort your sliders in ascending order by clicking Reorder Sliders.
You can invert the color/height relationship of your sliders. Useful when looking into a Negative Mode Filament Painting.
When loading Filament Sets, if Load w/ Defaults is toggled, the set will evenly space itself between Min Depth and Max Depth.
When quitting, you will be prompted to save if your project has been modified. You will also be prompted if you have loaded a new image since working on a project to make sure you aren’t accidentally overwriting an old project.
Lithophane predictions for layer heights under 0.12mm are more accurate.
Filament Library Import/Export. Easily import your personal library on Windows (MacOS handles this automatically) by pointing it at your prior HueForge folder.
Also you can export any group of filament Brand names to CSV or JSON to share with the community
Import from JSON or CSV as well creating new files or simply adding to your personal library.
More tutorials and affiliates.
Filaments with affiliate purchase links (some direct to the color, most at least to the type of filament) will be indicated by the lower right corner of the swatch having a black or white triangle in it.
Filament color sorting/matching is better.
Unbias Lighting is an experimental control to flatten scene lighting in an image. It doesn’t always give great results, but can be really useful at times.
Don’t consider this list exhaustive, but it is a good indication of the changes/fixes that have been made since v0.6.5. I hope you find them helpful to your HueForge workflow.
Where is the best place to report any issues?