Forged Image
A GPU-native compositor built from the engine up — not a CPU compositor with GPU nodes bolted on.
A professional node-based compositor built around an execution engine rather than a chain of image processors. Every request carries time, region and channel scope, so the engine only computes what the viewer actually needs — nothing more. Work is scheduled in tiles, cached with cost-aware eviction, and aborted cleanly the moment you move the playhead, which means interactivity holds up as scripts get deep.
Processing is GPU-resident by default with a CPU path that produces identical results, so you get speed without giving up correctness or portability. Concatenatable operations fuse into single kernels instead of round-tripping through memory at every node. Arbitrary named channels are first-class throughout — deep AOVs, custom passes and cryptomatte-style data move through the graph without special-casing. Color is scene-linear end to end with OCIO configs honored at input, working and output.
Every knob is animatable, dependencies are tracked at the knob level rather than the node level, and evaluation is deterministic and hashable — the same script produces the same pixels on your workstation and on the farm. Headless render licenses are free and unlimited, so scaling out costs render time, not license fees.
At a glance
- 118 nodes, a real 3D system and native VDB volumes
- Live, two-way Unreal Engine link
- Free, unlimited headless render licenses
Key features
A node-based compositor built for shot finishing — scene-linear from the file to the glass, GPU-accelerated, and wired directly into Unreal Engine. One hundred and eighteen nodes, a real 3D system, native volume rendering, and camera and object tracking, in a single application.
- Node types
- 118plus 16 scene nodes
- Pixel pipeline
- 32-bitscene-linear float
- Acceleration
- VulkanGPU compute + CPU fallback
- Color
- OCIOconfigurable working space
- Engine link
- Unreallive, two-way
- Platform
- Windowsbuilt in Rust
The engine
Built to stay responsive on real shots
Every result is a pure function of its inputs, so the engine knows exactly what changed and re-renders only that. Caching, undo, collaboration and farm rendering all ride the same machinery.
Content-hash caching
Results are keyed by what produced them. Change a knob and only the affected tiles recook — everything upstream stays warm.
Tiled, demand-driven evaluation
Only the region of interest you are looking at is computed, tile by tile, across every core.
GPU compute with fused chains
Pointwise operations batch into single dispatches and spatial filters run on the GPU, with an exact CPU path behind them.
Proxy scaling
Work at a fraction of full resolution with identical results at full res — a stride on the same kernels, not a second code path.
Full undo on every change
Each edit is a serialized command on one bus, which is also what makes session sharing and crash recovery possible.
Headless rendering
A command-line renderer and an in-app render queue share the engine the viewer uses — no separate batch mode to diverge.
Compositing
The full 2D toolset
Merges, transforms, filters and time — with premultiplication handled explicitly rather than guessed at.
Merges and masking
Every standard operation, plus masked merges, dissolves, channel copies and switches.
Explicit premult discipline
Associate and Unassociate as real nodes, so the state of your alpha is always something you can see.
Transform and warp
Concatenating transforms, corner pins, grid and pin warps, UV warps, and lens distortion with undistort.
Filters
Blur, defocus with real depth, directional blur, sharpen, median, erode, edge blur, glow, frequency separation and denoise.
Time
Retime, time offset, echo, frame hold, and motion-vector generation for vector blur.
Graph organisation
Groups, precomps with baking, explicit cache points, backdrops and dots — and paste straight from a Nuke script.
Merge Dissolve Copy Switch MaskedMerge Associate Unassociate Transform Crop Resize Mirror FourCorner GridWarp PinWarp UVWarp LensDistort AdjustBBox Blur Defocus DirectionalBlur Sharpen Median Erode FilterErode EdgeBlur Glow FreqSep Denoise Despot VectorBlur MotionBlur Retime TimeShift TimeEcho HoldFrame MotionVectors Group Precomp Cache Backdrop Dot
Color
Scene-linear, and able to prove it
One working space from the file to the display transform, with an audit trail that shows every conversion a pixel went through on the way to your monitor.
OCIO configuration
Load your show's config and work in its space, with display and view transforms in the viewer.
Grading toolset
Grade, color correct, curves, exposure, gamma, saturation, clamp and soft clip, plus a master color panel.
Hue tools
Hue correct, hue shift and a hue qualifier for secondary correction on a named range.
LUTs
File LUTs in the standard formats and editable curve LUTs, applied in the correct place in the chain.
Grade matching
Match one shot's balance to another from sampled regions rather than by eye.
Color Audit panel
Every transform between the file and the glass, listed — so a mismatch is something you read, not something you hunt.
Keying, roto & paint
Pulling and shaping mattes
A keyer family for screens that behave, and hand tools for everything that does not.
Keyer family
Screen keyers with clean-plate support, chroma keying, sampled keys and dedicated spill suppression.
Roto
Two-spline feathering, blend modes, layers, per-shape lifetimes and full animation.
Paint
A paint system with real brush semantics.
Tracking
2D, planar, camera and object
Solves that stay in the application, feeding the 3D system directly rather than round-tripping through another package.
Point and planar tracking
Classic point tracking and four-corner planar tracking for screen replacements and patches.
Camera solving
Solve a 3D camera and point cloud from the plate, and assemble the whole rig — camera, cloud, undistort and render — in one step.
Object tracking
Track a model through a shot in object or camera mode, with pin-based placement for tricky starts.
Moving-subject holdouts
Generate occlusion mattes for moving foreground so the solve and the comp both ignore what they should.
3D system
A real 3D scene inside the comp
A USD-shaped scene graph rendered through Vulkan, with lights, volumes and render passes that land back in the 2D graph as layers.
Scene construction
Cameras, cards, primitives, imported geometry, point clouds, axes and merges, with projection and display nodes.
Lighting
Distant, point, spot, rect and dome lights on the UsdLux model, with shadow maps and per-light AOVs you can regrade after the render.
Native VDB volumes
Read .vdb caches directly — no conversion step — with a sparse GPU march, scattering and emission, lit by your scene lights. Sequences animate and stream in the background.
Volume AOVs
Transmittance, emission, scatter and depth come out as separate layers, so fog and fire are gradeable in 2D.
PBR relighting
Relight a plate or a render from its intrinsic passes with full Cook-Torrance shading, screen-space lights, HDRI environments and screen-space shadows.
Viewport quality
MSAA, temporal AA, ambient occlusion, HDRI environments, configurable grid, and screenshots straight into the comp as scene-linear EXR.
Scene3D Camera3D Card GeoPrimitive ReadGeo3D PointCloud3D Project3D Display3D Transform3D Axis3D Merge3D Prune3D Light3D VDBRead VolumeShade Render3D PBRIngest BS_Relight
Unreal Engine
The engine, live in your comp
A two-way link to a running editor: navigate the level from the compositor, edit it, and pull real render passes back — without leaving the shot.
Live viewport stream
See the level in the compositor and drive its camera by navigating, in scene-linear float rather than a screen grab.
Two-way scene editing
The outliner is mirrored: select, move, hide, delete, spawn and re-folder actors, with the engine's own property panel reflected in.
Render jobs
Submit renders to the engine and scrub the frames as they land, with progress and cancel, cached so nothing re-renders twice.
Pick your passes
Choose exactly which passes a job renders from a described list — each named, explained, and marked available or not by the connected build.
Integration passes
Shadow catchers, holdouts, casters-only and hidden object sets, composited by a dedicated node.
Cryptomatte
Pick objects downstream by name from the manifest that rode the render, without going back to the engine.
Multi-pass
Take a render apart and put it back
Multilayer EXR handling that treats a render's passes as first-class, with a rebuild that proves it still adds up to the shot.
One-click rebuild
Drop SplitAOVs on a multilayer render and get the whole comb — a branch and a grading slot per pass, summed back to the beauty — as ordinary nodes, in one undo step.
Knows every vendor's names
Presets for the common renderers, auto-detected from the file, with unrecognised passes split and flagged rather than dropped.
Checks its own maths
A verification badge compares the sum of the branches against the beauty and turns red if a branch is muted or missing — a hand-built comb drifts silently; this one says so.
Contact sheet
Every pass in the file at once, labelled, in one grid — with data passes normalised so depth reads as depth.
Re-deliver
Recombine the graded branches into a multilayer EXR carrying the same layer names it arrived with.
Channel surgery
Route, merge, keep and remove channels directly when you want to do it by hand.
Finishing
The shot-finishing set
The tools that turn a technically correct comp into a shot that sits — the ones compers usually assemble from gizmos.
Edge treatment
Edge extend, edge breakup, roughen edges, edge light and edge fill for cut-out edges that read as photography.
Grain
Match and regrain plates so CG and photography share the same texture.
Atmosphere
Heat haze, exposure glow and chroma blur for lens and air behaviour.
Cleanup
Firefly removal, dead-pixel despot and a day-to-night conversion.
BS_EdgeExtend BS_EdgeBreakup BS_RoughenEdges EdgeLight EdgeFill Grain Regrain BS_HeatHaze BS_ExpoGlow BS_ChromaBlur BS_FireflyKill BS_DayToNight BS_MasterColor BS_HueQualifier
Input & output
Reads what the pipeline sends
Formats
OpenEXR including multilayer and multi-part, DPX, PNG, JPEG and TIFF, with image sequences handled as sequences.
Video
QuickTime, MP4, MKV, AVI and WebM for reference and review deliverables.
Delivery you can verify
Writes are atomic, and an optional pass re-opens each written frame and checks the pixels against what was rendered.
Provenance in the file
Every EXR carries the look it was viewed under, the camera and the job's fingerprint, so a frame can account for itself later.
Working in it
Built to be lived in
Dockable layouts
Tear out, re-dock and float any panel, with named layouts for compositing, animation, 3D, color and Unreal work.
Viewer
A/B compare and wipe, region of interest, gain and gamma, channel isolation, and scopes — histogram, waveform, parade and vectorscope.
Animation
A shared curve editor and dope sheet, with any knob animatable and expressions where you need them.
Playback cache
A sized RAM cache with a visible fill bar, so a cached range plays at project rate.
Session sharing
Two artists on one script over a socket, convergent by construction because every change is already a command.
Explains itself
Per-node and per-knob documentation in the interface, and tools that say why when they cannot do what you asked.
Forged Image is a single application. The compositor, the 3D system, the tracker and the Unreal link share one engine, one color pipeline and one undo stack — not a suite of plugins bolted to a host.
Built in Rust. GPU-accelerated with Vulkan. Windows.
Licensing
Per seat, per month
Always free
Headless render licenses
Free and unlimited. Scaling out to the farm costs render time, not license fees.
Professional
Under 100 seats
Self-serve card, or invoiced on request
Large Studio
100–199 seats
Invoiced, at a volume rate
Enterprise
200+ seats
Per seat, on custom terms
- SSO
- SLA
- Security review
- TPN
- LAN license server
- Named support contact
Education — campus
Unlimited campus seats
Flat annual, school-wide
Education — individual
1 seat
50% of Professional, with student verification
Pricing is announced at launch. Tell us your team size and we'll come to you with numbers first.
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