Project Dogwaffle Howler
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Yes, even an .mtl material export option!
great mate - can you give us an example rendered in Carrara yet ? :)
I have attached a screen shot of the options for saving an object. It's certainly not a finished obj! Anyway, hopefully that will answer your question.
And here is what it looks like rendered....
I haven't tried that part yet... but I'm going to soon
Yes! Awesome!
It's really amazing how much tweaking can be done within 3D Designer (in Howler) before committing to an OBJ export, or just using it as an image, etc., The (fairly recently) new Cloud Modeler, erosion and sediment and such... along with the ability to make basic texures for different areas... so for further work within Carrara, I was imagining using the textures creation element to create maps to further help apply other material elements within Carrara - like via the mixers and whatnot.... That might sound confusing, I use maps to control entire shaders within Carrara quite a bit using MultiChannel Mixer as well as just using mixers and gradients (controlled by a map) and so on.
So, for example, we could use the exproted maps from Howler to use as a mixer controller. But also so much more.
hey thanks for that, that's super - and very kind of you to explain - I better update my howler - I always buy it and never get a chance to play :(
clear as mud Dart :) no but that last sentence is a lightbulb thank you
:)
And Tickets are finally live! https://digitalartlive.com/event/how-to-create-stunning-landscape-scenes-with-pd-howler/
Hope to see you all there!
Awesome!!!
Thanks! I'm pretty excited about it. Bring your questions!
You should be excited! This is a big thing, and you'll be perfect for it! So cool!
Congratulations. Would like to make time for this because it would be amazing. However, not succeeding in signing up. I click to sign up and then get an empty cart message.
Did you change the "0" to a "1" on the main page?
Yes, you do have to change the 0 to a 1, like Dartanbeck said. I know I was caught with that on my first few Webinars with them, too. Look forward to seeing you there.
This was a fun excercise I did while messing around with just a very little time I had during the Holidays.
Fairly recently Howler recieved a cool new filter: Worley Noise. I used that to create a bazillion chunks of shattered glass. The render of Michael's face was just the face over a black background, so I had that in the Main buffer and the Worley Noise in the Swap. I used the magic wand to select all of the black surrounding Michael's face and, back in the Swap buffer, shift-selected some of the chunks that crossed the border so that I was also selecting chunks in front of his face, but only a few.
I found that, after mixing the Swap buffer with the Main, the leftover pieces of glass just looked too much like a white shape of no apparent interest, so I made a whole new selection of just some of those pieces - again, this was going very fast since I didn't have much time... just Shilf-click, click, click, click....
With a bunch of really white chunks selected (and then stored the selection for further use) I gave them a subtle shadow, embossed them a bit (using interactive Undo to make the effect a lot more subtle), and they still looked too white. So I went back into the swap buffer, this time with some random shapes of grayscale shapes, and used Wave Distort to make a sort of a circular, displaced and glossy screen of shapes that gave a reflective appearance.
Using the stored selection of the chunks again, I used Mix with Swap again and softly adjusted some of that crazy reflective look to come through. It was all very random and done very (Very) quickly.
Putting the original render of Michael's face into the Swap allowed my to make a selection of just his face and then, back in the Main, used the stored selection of the chunks to Subtract from that selection, was able to apply a Drop Shadow fro the face onto the chunks of glass in the background.
Then I made further blurred selections, removed the chunks from the selection, and darkened the selection to add some more depth to the whole thing. I did this a few times, each time using Iteractive Undo to make each pass very subtle.
Using the Special Effects brush I added some very quick lens flares to add some shine to the broken glass.
Yeah, I see a lot of things that should have been done better, and if this concept is accepted I will do a much better job with more time and higher resolutions to play with. But I'm still really intrigued with how easy and incredibly fast this whole thing went down.
Nice work, Dartanbeck!
I might suggest feathering or blurring the edges of the selection just a tiny bit to get rid of the pixelation at the edges. But, the whole image looks great.
Yeah, and I think I also forgot to turn on AA during my Magic Wand sessions :(
Worley noise... I like it! It's fun looking at all of the amazing things in Howler - things that I haven't fully explored yet. Then there's that pile of plugins to explore too... I wish I could play more - and for longer periods of time!
Great work, Dart, very creative!
Thx!
@Dartanbeck I've been looking a getting PD Howler but would I be able to insert and rendered figure into the landscape in creates? I've done a search but nothing seems to come up.
Well, not directly in Howler as a poseable figure, like in Carrara, DS, or Poser. However, Howler does have many ways of doing it in other ways.
For example, we can:
Let me know specifically what you need to do and I can give more ;)
An experiment I did while studying VFX techniques between Carrara animated renders and Howler was an amazing success and set me on a whole new way of thinking about making CG movies.
Here's a quick screenshot tutorial image I made for an article I started to write.
We're looking at Howler with my interface colored a bit differently than the original, and I have my toolbars set how I like them. It's all very easy to do in Howler.
The red arrows might be a little confusing without supporting text, so here's what's going on. I've circled the "Animation" tab, which allows us to load in animations in either sequenced images or avi files. The arrows are showing that, after loading in an animation I've used "Store Animation" > "To Disc" (uses Hard drive) or I could use "To Memory" (uses RAM), which gives is the windows we see on the left. Each of those three windows are a separate animation I've loaded into Howler.
If we look at those three windows (Stored Animations) we can see to checkboxes: "Use as Animated Swap Image" and "Use as Animated Selection"
So the first animation I loaded in was a separate pass I included in my original Carrara render. I used a Depth pass which results in some parts of the image being black (closest to the camera), some white (Furthest), and levels of gray for everything in between. There are many multipass options in Carrara that are magical for this stuff. For this, I went through the Depth Pass render and used Howler's Rotoscope tools to remove all of the gray information, so that only the character was black, everything else is white. I could have achieved the proper map, I'm sure, using a different multipass option during the render - but....
So I loaded in the separate pass, which is grayscale. In Howler and other composite software, white = selected, black = deselected, various levels of gray are everywhere in between. I wanted to have a version with the character fully selected as well, so I ran the Invert filter with the "Animate" box checked, so it would invert each frame of the animation, then I stored that one too.
So now I have the two animated selection videos stored on my screen, I load in the beauty (full color render) pass and, just for safe keeping, stored that one as well. Not only for safe keeping, however, because sometimes I find the need to set it as an Animated Swap and use one of the masks as an Animated Selection, and blend some of the original pass back into the result I'm working on.
With the Beauty Pass in the Main window (Shown kinda small in the center of the interface, so that I could draw arrows and such), I can alter the whole video using Howlers many, Many filters. Then I can also use either of the grayscale mask videos as an Animated Selection, and apply filters and adjustments to only the selected areas of the video.
In this, she sees something coming, so she turns and runs down the corridor. The door at the end wisks open as she runs through and it closes behind her. The slection animation followers her, her hair and her clothing perfectly throughout the whole sequence, so I can easily apply effects to her separately from the rest of the scene. I also found myself loading in the original Depth Pass render to apply a more gradual depth of field effect - worked beautifully!
It's amazing how much just this one simple technique helps with post work on animated renders... Amazing! But Howler has so much more too.
Just ask if you'd like to know something.
Other Howler users likely shake their heads at my interface, but I like it this way.
Tiffany taught me how to keep the Alpha tool open on the interface. I like leaving it open. I use those Alpha tools all the time. The toolbar on the left can be one single row instead of the side-by-side format I'm using. But in this side-by-side mode, the related tools are right next to each other, and I find it quicker and easier for me. I also moved my animation timeline to the bottom to better resemble how I work in Carrara. The colors? Well... Dan added the ability to use different schemes, so I tried them all and found that I really like this one! ;)
I'm not Dartanbeck, but the way I would do that, (and I'm not too familiar with Carrara) i would create a landscape in Howler, and then drop it in as a background image in DS and render from there.
Or you could put the landscape on a flat primitive (and make planes for foliage made in Howler, too) and then put the planes in and around your figure in the foreground and then render.
Or, as he said above, render the figure as a png and then composite it into Howler in postwork.
This is a composite of the Unicorn which was rendered as a png, in DS, and then brought into Howler.
https://dakorillon.deviantart.com/art/I-Am-in-the-World-the-World-is-in-Me-617735742
This was a landscape that was placed on a curved primitive (multiplane cyclorama) and then rendered over
https://dakorillon.deviantart.com/art/Makara-Life-599798121
And this was a landscape that was dropped into the backgound (via Environment tab) and then rendered
https://dakorillon.deviantart.com/art/Desert-Winds-700760842
I hope that answers your questions? If not, please explain!
PD Howler is on sale now at it's main site. Or there is going to be a coupon for a discount if you sign up for the webinar.
Hope to see everyone there!
wow Dart, that's pretty awesome :)
Thanks! :)
Right, and that's a great way to work as it keeps renders and 3d scenes light weight.
However, Carrara has the great atmospheres and the ability to deal with lots of content. Sometimes we might want our characters to interact with the terrain. Howlers 3D Designer along with the cool tools we have to create the height map in the first place, is really pretty cool for making terrain pieces for use right inside our 3d scenes.
Sometimes I'll use 3D Designer to export the OBJ to bring into Carrara. Other times I'll use 3D Designer to help visualize and tweak the terrain and then export the height and erosion maps for use in Carrara's terrain modeler, which is also really fun. The advantage of the latter is that Carrara allows us to specify how dense the actual mesh is logically (rendered mesh resolution) and physically (actual mesh resolution). This helps us if we would rather work with a lower density mesh, using the power of shaders to bring out more detail.
Another beautiful thing about Carrara is that we can populate the entire 360 degrees of a scene, drop in a spherical camera and shoot a spherical render for use in a 360 degree panoramic background. This is the same type of map used in Iray's Dome, for example. I use these spherical maps in Carrara. With studying and some practice, we can also shoot these spherical renders at various exposures to use as bracketed images to merge into an HDRI.
PuppyRay (in Howler) is amazing too, and is a 360 degree ray trace environment with atmosphere controls, visual sun, editable skies and we can animate the terrain. I don't have much experience with it yet, being stuck in Carrara when ever I can find the time. Watching what Dan and Phillip are doing with it is nothing short of spectacular, and now there's refracting, rippling water. I wonder if he'll ever drop in the possibility to render to spherical in that!
3D Designer was cool when I first bought Howler and it has been getting better and better all along. Dan is amazing at how much he develops this wonderful conceptual art/vfx/animation tool!
Here's a single frame taken from one of the new animation clips with a bit of common visual effects applied to it. Hard to take this into context, and it looks so much more cool in motion, but I still kinda like this shot. Carrara + Howler = ROCKS!!!
Can't wait to show some of the animated footage
(looks a lot better when clicked on for full resolution)
Can't wait to SEE some of the animated footage! Great tutorial info by the way.