Project Dogwaffle Howler
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So, some of these channels, like depth channel, was that rendered in Dazstudio, Carrara, Poser or other? Either way, you could load that into the alpha channel of Dogwaffle, to make it a selection that fades with distance. Then you can do all sorts of things that are limited to the little critter or the foreground, such as fade the background to blurry (might need to invert alpha first). There's also another filter in the Artistic filters group, Brush Strokes. Can also be useful. Perhaps in one layer and again in another layer with different direction. Layers will multiply or otherwise combine.
Ahh, what a great idea. Thanks for that! Will try it this evening!
The renders are Carrara. The Carrara depth pass is strange but I will keep playing with it. For example if you use an infinite plain, the plane is black from near to far - and so are things on it (?)
so once you discover that it helps.
I'm not sure if the depthe effect is focal length dependent or whether a render of an individual object as opposed to that object in a scene, gives a different depth effect/
Will check it out because those things too will make a big difference.
thanks again for your help. It really helps to have such good guided exploration.
cheers ;)
Hello, here's another look at some of the techniques to add a toony artsy look including a border around the rendered character coming out of Poser in this example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPxHArAOk7w&feature=youtu.be
wow! thanks very much for the doing that!
Looks great and lots of stuff to chew on.
Shows how deep this goes.
Can't wait to have a play with all these ideas :)
!!!!!!!!
appreciated once again.
You know, I'll never tire of your instructional videos. You can just keep making them if you want... hint, hint!
On that note, you could even make some for Carrara, if you'd like :)
Just FYI:
I have edited the First Post of this Thread with a nice pile of links to help guide you into some great ways to find out more about Project Dogwaffle.
Whether you already have any version of Dogwaffle or just want to have a look at some of what this amazing software is all about, you'll find some great information and links in that, initial post.
I'd also like to mention that the latest and greatest Dogwaffle is now available here, at the Daz3d store!
Thanks for all the information you added and all the work!
Yes that works thank you.
We need a thread on Carrara rendering layers I think - they seemed underused.
And they obviously work well when used in Dogwaffle. ;) (insert wink here)
Yes... We need that!
Exactly, using a regular plane as a "background" will force the greyscale values to a specific range of distances.
The problem here is that a maximum of 256 greyscale values will be used, so if you don't "limit" the distance range you may end up with a bunch of objects with the same (or close to the same value). Obviously this is not very useful for a depth information.
If Carrara used 65536 (16-bit) greyscale values, the depth pass would be much more useful. For compositing with transparency or blur, the 256 values is a severe limitation. Hopefully this will be corrected very soon because in my opinion it is one of the main things preventing Carrara from being used professionally for compositing work
I should say limited to 256 greyscale values when exported. Internally, Carrara is using more or we would not get the nice renderings with subtle transparency.
Thanks for the explanation. I often wondered how contracting the depth of a scene would change the range of tonal values in a depth pass, and there the answer was looking at me all the time (in how the infinite plane works) Yet I didn't see it :)
cheers
If you wanted consistency with this, you would need an object(s) always the same near distance and always the same far distance that is rendered by the camera.
I suppose you could build a "set" that would accomplish this. The near and far objects could also be very small. What I have not experimented with yet is if the objects were smaller than a pixel in the finished rendering if this would still work to limit the range without requiring any editing later.
Speaking of building sets, that's what I am constantly doing with Carrara - constantly. The advice I give in "Your Carrara Browser" is how I am able to keep all of the things I'm constantly doing in an organized library that I can access at any moment's notice. So when you hear me going off about how happy I am because I just bought Shanty Town by TheAntFarm, you'll also know that I have given it the standard lighting and shader treatment in a scene with a standard background that fits with the continuity of the rest of my scenes, and saved it in it's rightful spot as a new .car file.
This is a big part of what I consider to be the Magic of Carrara - as no other software has ever been so friendly towards accomplishing these tasks - that I have tried.
Similarly, I have large plans for Howler as well.
I can't count how many times Ive sent a clip to the recycle bin simply because of some strange thing unexpectedly occurring in the scene. The curve tool is what I will soon be referring to as "rotoscope magic" tool. This thing is super easy to set up. 8.2d has the ability to add and move points to the curve with the same tool - so I just click around, if I need a point, one is made. Now I can do many, Many things with that curve. After using it's rotoscoping tools for the first time, you quickly get the feel for how to set it up for all projects after that. Because you get to see and feel how you want to move the points at each key frame, from start through to the end. The tool doesn't care what you do - so it has no limitations, really. But I was using it to add a moving element to a scene in motion. So the scene was filmed with a camera-in-motion, and the thing I was making was also moving. But you can use it to perform post work to only portions of an animation, or... well - I guess I could list things all day - because there are really no limits to what you can do with it. That one tool.
If you know your scene, and what you want to do with it, Howler has many possible ways of dealing with giving that to you - depending upon which method might be easier for you. For example, you can draw a sweep in real time and then erase any mark that you just made, and you the motion that you've just performed as a template for Howler to animate upon. I plan to use this method for adding footprints to sand, snow or mud, etc., and many other effects. You can pick up portions of your animation and store what you've picked up to create your own animated brush - and use it along the path - or by hand - or whatever you want.
Oh... and you can really paint in Howler too!
There's a lot going on in the Doggie Park! Dogwaffle Pro, Howler is preparing to release a brand new edition sporting some great, new features...
Wow... look at the bottom. Linux/Mac Support via Wine! :)
Here's an excerpt from a news flash at TheBest3d.com
What's New in v9?
(preliminary features list, and still a work in progress)
There is a new Side-By-Side comparison option for filters, where appropriate. You can see what it looks like on the left side before, and on the right side after the effect has been applied.
Puppy ray is a new ray tracer with soft shadows, global illumination, high quality antialiasing, etc. Puppy ray presently supports rendering height maps. You give it an image, it thinks it's the elevation map of a landscape, and it renders it with a few extras such as lighting, fog and background sky dome.
The "Allow custom brush transforms" option now has a button on the context strip for easy access.
Faster switching between different media, startup, and various functions.
Improved international support... use of comma "," as decimal separator is supported.
Loading brush images no longer defaults to targa only.
The paper panel now has a "more papers..." option.
The brush keyframer now has a linear interpolation option.
We have increasingly less usage of .net framework for those who don't want to use it.
The countdown filter now uses a more standard colorbars and real-time preview.
There's a new particle gravity filter that can render some interesting spinning glows and flares.
sizing the layers panel works more smoothly.
Orbicles can be scaled interactively on its preview pane.
previously telescoping the info panel didn't refresh the info until you moved the pointer over the main image, which was disorienting.
Copy/paste for rotoscoping.
Starry night and Animated flares and glows is integrated into one filter, and updated with more speed and real-time preview.
Some speed improvements to graphics halftone filter.
Loading of specific frames from an AVI.
Loading AVI's no longer continues to load frames if the animation cannot be initialized.
General, cosmetic and functional updates.
Use of .net framework is reduced significantly. .net framework 4 is not supported by Wine on Linus, thus we are further minimizing our use of it.
Internalized and improved:
Brush keyframer (New linear option)
non-photo-blue frame cleanup tool and single frame blue cleanup tool.
store image copy/store brush as image/load to store... internalized and updated.
Patterns (loads faster)
Paint on alpha (No window, uses less screen space)
Raw loader
Error diffuse
YUv and YIQ color charts
RYB color picker
RYB color ranges
Palette color picker
Premultiply correction / selection menu
Premultiply correction for brushes
Time Shift RGB
Hexidecimal color tool
Dogwaffle color picker
Graphic Halftone (Faster)
Woodgrain filter (Realtime preview)
Countdown filter (more standard colorbars, realtime preview)
Starry night filter (Faster, realtime preview, enhanced)
Animated glows and flares (combined into Starry night)
AviToAnimation (faster/uses less memory/bug fixes)
GPU'd
Zoom blur
Mystic vision/dark vision.
Bug fixes
Fixed a 'chromatic aberration' bug in frame sequence loading.
Improved support for running under Linux and Mac using Wine.
cosmetic fix on the browser
Linux/Mac with Wine
Miles of fixes and speed improvements.
Separate fork for the Browser because the timosoft control is not supported.
The update is very inexpensive I updated Thursday after I sent an email to my discount code and got a reply back with it for the upgrade and downloaded the beta.
The arrival of little Olivia, my new baby Grand Daughter (first for me!) has kept me from trying it out, more than just opening it up to see if my config and AnyFX was properly behaving - as it is. Wow. Their beta crew is thorough, aggressive, and pleasantly respectful to the developer - even (especially) when reporting fixe that need to be made. Impressive crew!
Congratulations on the new granddaughter.
Thanks Jay! She's gorgeous!
(she smells like... like baby!) lol
I love that smell!
So have you tried Puppy Ray yet? In Phil's Alpha Video he shows how we can use an image for the height map, which is kept on the main window, a texture map for what that height map ends up producing in the swap window, and a sky dome image stored as a custom brush - which is pretty cool, really. I gave it a try last night on my little Win 8 netbook, just to familiarize myself with where Puppy Ray is located and to get a first glance at its controls. So I only made a quick height map and then launched it.
Wonderfully detailed work panel for setting it up for render. Although for much of that, you need to click on the "more" button.
Without clicking on 'more', I was able to load a sky from the main window. At least I think that's what I did. I could turn on Global Illumination, render quality and various other aspects of the 'scene'. I shot a 'medium' quality render, which is near the bottom of the quality list, I believe, and was impressed by the speed and quality of the thing. I can surely see this getting addictive! :)
Dan Ritchie, if you read this, how in the world do you come up with this cool stuff? Puppy Ray! How incredibly cool to have in a freaking Paint Program! :)
I really amazing Paint Program, though. I began to try free hand painting in Howler, just since I've acquired 9 beta. Before that I've just been enjoying all of these wonderful tools on images that existed prior. But I am really impressed with how real these various media 'feel'. I currently have a little Wacom Graphire 3. I'm now considering graduating to something, perhaps, a bit bigger.
Thank you for Project Dogwaffle for one. But even more so, Thank you for Howler!
Congratulation Dart.
Ciao Max.
Thanks, Son! ;)
Here's a quick and simple example of the Puppy Ray render engine at work. To help make up for my inexperience at setting up the colors for, and the height map, I have had some fun with some of the particles brushes and finally added a simple gradient brush lens flare.
I find it amazing how less than ten minutes of messing around while waiting to get into the bathroom can produce something so fun!
Check it out!
They've just added Animation Capabilities to Puppy Ray!!!
Howler 9 just keeps getting better!
Thats pretty sweet.
Btw, been offline due to $$$ issues.
Some quick news.
Archipelis Designer 4 is out and has a Dogwaffle export option. I you already own Archipelis Designer the upgrade is free.
Cury which has a link wit Dogwaffle is about to come out with a 3.0 The upgrade of that program to the new version is free or discounted depending on when you bought it..
50 new sticker brushes are out for Dogwaffle. When you ordered or upgrade to version 9 you get the passwords for the bushes,
http://www.thebest3d.com/howler/download/free-brushes-3d-stickers-by-Michel-Agullo/index.html
Some more brushes are going to get released in the future and you can see some of them. close to 500 have been done.
The cow brush looks cute and the kokeshi ones are very nice looking. The cow brush is included with Howler 9 along with some others, The kokeshi ones haven't been released yet.
Howler has a free Learning Edition available.
I've cut and pasted the info about from the Dogwaffle Newsletter.
Howler Learning Edition can be downloaded for free for non-commercial use from the servers on www.squirreldome.com, specifically at http://www.squirreldome.com/download/Howler_8_2_Learning_Edition_rc03.exe
It can also be found for a limited time at http://www.thebest3d.com/howler/download/home-edition/index.html
Please note that some systems may require "Run as Administrator" to install and/or operate the program.
Howler Learning Edition Features
Natural media, many presets, fully customizable.
Breakthrough performance even on modest hardware.
Full graphics tablet support, Wacom, Monoprice, etc.
Custom brushes, bristle brushes, particle brushes, foliage brushes, brushes under the influence of force fields...
Dynamic fully editable Foliage brushes.
Animated (multi-frame) custom brushes.
Over 140 fast, often real-time, full featured filters..
Premium color mixing tools. Red-yellow-blue, palette mixer, lots more.
Select colors by pigment name, crimson red, rose madder, etc.
Multi-monitor support.
Mirror and Symmetrical painting, Kaleidoscope.
Brush keyframing to move images around screen in an animation.
Brush timeline to apply keyframable filters to an animated brush.
Animation features:
Traditional animation.
Onion skin.
Load/Save AVI's, frame sequences.
Frame scanning.
Line cleanup and non-photo blue removal.
Timeline to apply filters
Exposure sheet with lip syncing.
Frame sequencer. Sequence frames by painting them.
Rotoscoping for matte creation.
Motion analysis to create slow motion or add motion blur to stop motion.
Animation re-timing.
Editor functions, cut/copy/paste/blocks, etc.
Interlaced video support.
Batch processing.
Visual batch conversion and renaming.
Image stabilization. Camera motion stabilization – smoothing, removal and re-addition.
Motion tracking in the brush keyframer.
Motion prediction for frame extrapolation and selective motion blurring.
Insert, reverse sequence, make loopable, make an animation seamless like making a texture seamless. Crop an animation like cropping an image.Gamma correction. Premultiply correction.
Very cool news, Jay! Thanks, Sir!
That's really neat, and is a true testament to the honest ambition to please the end user.
They are committed to getting this software to anyone that wonders what it's all about. It behaves a bit different than what many people suspect. Yet it's capable of such amazing possibilities. I am still very much learning the ropes. So I find their complete works of Dogwaffle training videos (free on YouTube) to be a great place to hang out.
I started my adventure in the Daily Dose, where Philip introduces you to your new life as an media artist owning your tools as if the canvas is right in front of you, and your mouse or, better yet - the stylus of a graphics tablet can give you amazing power over creating and/or editing art. He's a great teacher, and really appears to love showing us anything we want to know - so the collection is very rich in true training. The titles of the videos do describe the overall topic, but you learn much more than that - simply because of the wealth of knowledge he has and shares about how things are done in Dogwaffle. Just following a few of his examples - and you're making really cool stuff.
Beginning there was excellent, but I found that you could(should?) actually begin learning Howler 8 and 9 by beginning with the Howler 7 or 8 videos, and then pop on the Daily Dose fairly often to round out your knowledge and inspiration. My Playlists of his YouTube tutorials has four main links that start the playlist, running them in the order in which they were intended to be seen - as shown in purple in the lists provided in the thread. It has not been updated with the latest videos, and likely won't be for some time - I only created them to illustrate where they are and what all of the titles are up to that point. Believe me when I say that you'll walk away know a lot more than just those titles... which is already any excellent list. By the time you complete everything in that playlist series, you've seen most of Dogwaffle and have good reference to come back to in a pinch.
Back to the free learning Howler
If you try it and like it, I would consider checking out the videos Phil's been making about Puppy Ray in the new Howler 9! This Newsletter has some great information on Howler 9, with some really interesting video playlists illustrating some of what they've been doing with Puppy Ray, the new ray trace render engine in Howler 9. Being able to animate your height maps is amazing! Scroll down and watch those!
Lastly, Project Dogwaffle is available at many ranges of price, depending upon your needs. The older versions were packed with abilities. The new you get, the more abilities. If you have no need to edit or produce animations, you don't need the pro version, which is Howler. "Artist", I believe, is the same software as Howler, except that it lacks the Animation menu commands. You may still load in avi for animating brushes and such, but the Animation menu commands include the abilities of loading, saving, and all of the editing that occurs between those two.
I had to go with Howler. Animations are all I ever want to make. Now that I have Howler 9, I find it a bummer that I deleted all of those avi renders that were totally great except for some flickering, or misplaced action - something wrong... Howler is really potent in that you can actually paint fixes directly onto a frame. With the curve tool, Howler opens a Rotoscope menu where you can key frame your selection and do nearly anything you want across the entire animation according to what ever it is you've selected. Even blur your selection or do many other things with it. Some of the videos show great examples of using the curve tool to correct errors, or to simply change things. Selecting a moving target is now made easier with motion tracking. Really cool stuff. The developer, Dan Ritchie made some really cool cartoon animations directly in Howler - and demonstrates the process a bit in some more of the videos. How to paint an orange, a face portrait, making planets from breakfast... really fun stuff! :)
I love it. Although I still have much to learn, including getting accustomed to using a graphics tab, I use it all the time and just love it!
I have seen questions around regarding how well Dogwaffle replaces this or that image editor. No. Wrong mind frame.
Use Dogwaffle with the rest of your kit. Although I cannot think of a replacement for Dogwaffle, it's still nice to keep whatever photo editor you already have. You'll quickly see where to go to do what as you shape your images and animations. Likewise, you still need a movie editor to join all of your clips together for an end result. Howler is what you use to get those frames to that editor with their needed effects and fixes - paintings and ray traces - and made or tweaked motion blurs that you can work with through many different ways and angles, selections made by painting... oh my... if I keep this up I'll never stop. There's a lot that we can do. Philip and Dan do a great job of getting us started. Then just let your unique self take over and master your imagination to life!