Filters Unlimited 1.0 finished

["Michael Johannhanwahr" <mjohannh@provi.de>]

Hello everyone,

finally, Filters Unlimited 1.0 has been finished. I've added a lot of 
new interesting features. Especially interesting are the new language 
elements and functions I've introduced.

- 100 built-in gradients for either direct access through the filter 
code or by using an interactive selection window. 

- several built-in bitmaps you can use as bump-maps, displacement 
maps or anything you want. See the samples! 

- built-in perlin noise generator for complex procedural textures 
(unofficial, experimental stage but very interesting)

- a "case" expression: 
case(val(0, 0, 3), 
  0: abs(get(0) + get(1)),
  1: dif(get(0), get(1)),
  2: min(get(0), get(1)),
  3: max(get(0), get(1))
 )

and many more nice things....

Better compatibility: Works with nearly all hosts, including 
Premiere 5.0! The problem with host compatibilty is that many hosts 
do not comply to the documented Adobe standard in displaying the 
preview (also known as proxy). I am working in RGB"A" mode always to 
let the filter designer see what happens to the alpha channel even if 
there is no alpha channel available. This seems to confuse every host 
which doesn't work with layers. In this case you are getting a 
horizontally stretched preview with vertical stripes. Too bad. In 
this case I'm displaying the preview through my own routine which is 
a bit slower but works. Even Adobe Premiere 5.0 does not follow the 
standards here! The problem is that there is no official way to find 
out which host is calling my plugin. To be exact, there is a way but 
a lot of hosts are thinking they are Photoshop but aren't. So I ended 
up with hard coding the filename of the host to find out. Not very 
elegant but seems to work. If you know a better solution, please tell 
;-)

There is a demo for download at the newly designed I.C.NET homepage
http://www.icnet.de. The demo is fully functional but limited to 
preview only. Sorry.

Please uninstall and delete all files of the beta version before 
using the new demo.

Thanks and have a great day,
Michael.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Johannhanwahr  mailto:mjohannh@provi.de   ICQ:#6653703
Robert-Bunsen-Str. 70  http://johann.simplenet.com
28357 Bremen, Germany  phone: +49 (0)421 256312 / fax: 2576325