CValley
FILTERiT 4
[Page 3 of 4]
I find the
performance of FILTERiT's live effects to be quite good. When
you start dealing with very complex objects, such as ones that
have had several live effects applied, you do start to see a
performance lag. This is a function of the speed of your particular
machine. But something like the circle of flowers above is drawn
pretty much in real time on a lower-end G4 400.
The regular
effects
Live effects are great for their editability and also range
of styles. But you don't get the full picture of FILTERiT 4's
power until you start messing around with the new tools this
set of plugins gives you. These new tools appear in the tool
palette in Illustrator just below all of the standard tools.
It includes six new tools, five of which call up a palette of
subtools, along with various control settings. These include
Craft, Lens, Warp, Wave, Metabrush and Align Points.
The Craft
Tools includes four subtools for "crafting" objects.
In use, this translates as smudging, nudging and otherwise freely
and interactively deforming paths using a variable-radius brush.
Using the Craft tool is as simple as dragging around the brush
over an existing object. All of the magic happens in the background.
The image below shows the original flower and a "Crafted"
flower, which had been smudged around the original simply by
dragging the Craft brush over and around it.
The Lens
tool is similar to the Craft tool except that it creates, as
its name suggests, lens effects. These include fisheye, magnification,
twirl and tone. You simply drag the brush over the object, and
the effect is immediately applied. The examples below show normal
(left), twirl and fisheye. You can increase the size of the
lens for more dramatic effects.
The Warp
tool is not like Craft and Lens in that it doesn't use a brush.
Rather, you select one of 22 warp styles and then interactively
apply the warp to an object by moving your cursor around the
screen. The examples below show the original (left) and two
of the warp styles.
The Wave
tool is similar to the Warp tool in the way you apply it. But
rather than creating warps, it places waves on an object interactively.
You can adjust the number of cycles numerically and then apply
the waves to the object by dragging around your cursor on the
screen. Where you move your cursor determines the height and
width of the waves. The examples below show three types.
