Project Dogwaffle Howler
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I need to drag you to Canada so we can drink Alexander Keith's IPA. From Nova Scotia. It's one of my favourites!No dragging required! I seldom drink alcohol, but that doesn't mean that I don't like it! My ex-boss makes some fantastic beers. His Winter Wheat, IPA, and others have a truly genuine beer flavor and texture... yum.
I had some fun this week, Rosie and I both celebrating our birthdays.
One of my fun activities was to make a few animated scenes and brushes for Philip Staiger (Staigerman here - marketing director of Project Dogwaffle) for his seminar. It was really fun working back and forth across slightly different time zones - only two hours, making different, very subtle motions, yet purposefully not subtle enough so that Philip can fix it in Howler.
Howler is amazing at being able to fix animations that just aren't right.
But more than that, these starship animations can be loaded in as an animated brush, so that what the brush adds to another animation or still, is animating as it gets painted, frame-by-frame! It's really cool! Animations have their timeline in Howler, for keyframing changes or simply applying an effect across the whole animation. Anything you add via the timeline can be animated if you like - almost the same as working in Carrara's timeline - so it's really easy, but powerful. But an animated brush also has a timeline editor. This is, so far, beyond my practices in Howler, so the only thing I can tell you about it is that the system is very powerful.
This allows us to be able to paint animated images onto still backgrounds, still images onto animated backgrounds, and animated images onto animated backgrounds! So for a quick example, you can go into Carrara and set up a particles emitter like the one in PhilW's Advanced Training, of a rocket blast or an explosion that goes from hot, intense fire into dark, deadly smoke, and render the thing out as an sequenced tga with alpha enabled, and tat can be loaded directly as an animated brush in Howler. It can also be loaded into Artist, but Artist cannot turn it into an animation, but can take advantage of your animated brush. Anyways, you may now 'Save and Manage' you brush which places a small control panel on the screen pertaining to that brush. Now you can switch to another brush and just click on this panel to get this brush back - it's all very cool!
The panel gives you more power over your brush. You may now change the size, rotation, hue, and more, before applying it to anything. You may also view the filmstrip of all of the images in the brush.
Howler is also incredibly useful for taking these animations, intended to be used as a brush, and editing them first. Load them as an sequenced animation file and slow it down, speed it up, add effects, change the viewing angle - pretty much any sort of change you can dream up. Then save it back out as a new animation, which can then be loaded into the brush to be applied to another image or animation. Sweet? Yeah... I know!
Anyways, I'm really looking forward to watching Philips lecture tonight. Perhaps it will finally entice me into buying PS?
Sorry for posting twice, but I didn't want this getting lost on the back page:
Howler & Photoshop in Action!
This is a free seminar to learn more about how you can use PD Howler together with Photoshop. from the eventbrite page:
http://photoshopuser.eventbrite.com
Photoshop Users Group presents: "PD Howler and Photoshop in Action"
Photoshop Users Group
Thursday, February 27, 2014 from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM (PST)
Being part of the Dogwaffle project created by Dan Ritchie, PD Howler is an effects program that you might want to consider for using along side Photoshop.
Project Dogwaffle contains a mixed bag of visual tricks for the casual artist and graphic artists. With natural media brushes that include bristle brushes and pigment lifting, the Howler edition of Project Dogwaffle also offer animation and video tools, such as rotoscoping, motion tracking and motion estimated interpolation. Howler also includes a GPU-accelerated ray tracing engine for 3D from elevation maps.
In this presentation, you will see several ways to create pieces of artwork that will be eventually assembled in Photoshop through several layers.
This includes
- several ways to create a background sky
- Raytraced rendering 3D terrain from elevation map with Dogwaffle's Puppy Ray
- using particle and foliage brushes for foreground elements
After assembling it all in Photoshop, we'll flatten it to re-export it to Dogwaffle and enter another dimension: time. We'll add animation to it, for animated snowfall or lens flares that track a rising Sun.
The event is online, powered by Adobe Connect.
Hope to see you there.
I'm not well versed in animated gif settings, as you can tell. This looks much better as an HD movie clip!
I made this animation while I was messing with ideas for Philip. I decided to load it into Howler and enhance it slightly. Since I knew that my gifs turn out like this, and that this is why I was doing it, I didn't spend much time with it. Still looks kinda cool, I think.
The attacking missile is a Howler lens flare animation. when I went back to key frame a zero value between the start and the initial explosion, I noticed that it made that missile-like motion - so I left it alone. Looks neat, don't you think?
I will be there for the event.
Regards
Cool! I'll sit by you then. Don't mind Garstor... he may pump iron and have bulges all over, but he's nice. :)
Wow, that gif above really has over saturated brightness, eh? I wish we could post up avi or images sequence animations instead! ;)
This should be a really cool presentation. Philip is an excellent speaker on this sort of stuff. I noticed there's a new one on their YouTube channel about Archipelis Designer 4.0, a modeler that creates the mesh for you, after you outline a picture you import with a pen line. The mesh then generates fully textured to the image you loaded in. Kinda cool. But he was demonstrating using that model as an output as a new Dogwaffle brush. Archipelis has an Export > Dogwaffle function built in :)
I have version 3.0, and I see on the above link that I can get 4.0 upgrade free! Neato!
From the seminar,
Thank you Dartanbeck the links ai got from the tickets didn't work. The one you posted did.
Awesome presentation, didn't you think?
Excellent a bit overwhelming.. so many places to go
I think you missed a lot - which doesn't help. Philip is much easier to follow when you catch him from the beginning. All of us who have attended are supposed to be getting a link to a video of the session. I hope so. The very beginning, while Stephen was welcoming everyone and talking about stuff, Philip was using the Brush Key Framer, where you can keyframe out how you want the brush to animate across your animation. This is cool stuff. I think that this might be unique to 9.1 - at least the version that he was using, but I could be wrong on that. Nonetheless, I cannot wait to learn more! :)
Philip, fantastic presentation, my friend!
Lol yes that's a nice side-effect of the lens flare. It shows that in the world of animated special FX, it's not about recreating the real thing, but rather the art of conveying an illusion of seeing what you think you want to see. It helps NOT having 20/20 vision too.
Not much you can do with animated gifs when there are too many colors for it to handle. Gif is inherently limited to 256 color per frame. Many tools that publish to animated gif will go through the whole sequence of frames and collect a single color map that best represents the approximation of colors for all frames combined. Even if you have single colormaps per each frame it will show color banding, easily. The only way around perhaps is to allow for dithering, sort of a stipple pattern, to make it a little bit fuzzier but looking cricher in color gradients from a distance. But that affects the runlengtth encoding of same-colored pixels and creates larger file sizes.
I'm uploading another tutorial to Youtube at the moment, with the same spaceship in the 60-frame banking motion, showing it moving from near right to far left as it enters a chaotic scene of expanding plasma clouds and debris from an exploding star. The Starry Skies filter from Howler's ANimated Filters collection has the nice ability to slap some lensflares over the brightest starts and that can create a nice chaotic mess of clouds and rings, glowing and expanding as they move. Save it as an AVI or DWA (the Animation -> Save... default, i.e. the Dogwaffle Animation format, essentially a quick memory dump, uncompressed but fast (if your disk drive can cope with fast)), and you can use it as the animated swap buffer. Then you can use it to displace itself with the animated displacement filters in the Timeline group.
Just tapping into the power of the swap buffer :-)
Link coming up soon.
YouTube is taking a bit longer than usual, perhaps this is a long video (35 minutes or so)... will be here eventually:
Animated starry background with flares and other special effects
http://youtu.be/z0KUGnGINdo
I confess to a white lie... After Staigerman's excellent talk on Thursday night I said I'd buy Howler the next day.
:red: I didn't mean to lie about that...stuff got in my way. :red:
But I remedied that just now! Howler 9.1 is now on my server and I'm switching machines to install it and start playing around. Can't wait to combine renders with Howler and Photoshop!
Very, Very Cool... both of you!
And here's another:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbBp2teCHwE
I really wish that evilproducer had a less limited internet solution - I know he would get a kick out of these - even being a MacOS user.
By the way, does Howler 9.1 work in MacOS now, using Wine? I recall Dan working on that.
In this second one, Stroke player vs ALT key method, I am really enjoying the tutorial on keying the animated brush, by right-clicking on the brush selector and working with the high and low pass according to your selected transparency key... Sweet!
Thanks for this, Philip. All of these techniques, between both that you've just posted, are exactly what I asked about.
This is really good. What he's doing here, in this second video, is compositing spinning asteroids, still hot from the event, onto the video, which could be any video but he goes into length on how to make such a video in the first video tutorial mentioned in the above posts.
To do this, he made an animated brush and has just optimized its alpha for the transparency he needs. Okay, on with the lesson! ;)
Something else that's really fun to consider is to use Howler to create or edit footage for the use of having an animated backdrop in Carrara. Carrara even lets us load animation footage in shaders for texture maps. So you can have moving alpha, bumps, highlights, colors, and anything else that can take a texture map.
Hello wafflers, we have released another collection of free toon brushes (3d stickers) by talented French artist Michel Agullo (who uses Hexagon for 3D modeling). This is batch #4, and contains 18 new stamps, in the Dogwaffle media format (for use in 'Browse Media' brush selector. Best used with Howler 9 but probably also will work with earlier versions.
http://www.thebest3d.com/howler/download/free-brushes-3d-stickers-by-Michel-Agullo/index.html
Happy painting and stamping!
-Philip
Also,
Man! I Love Howling in Howler! This software just keeps blowing my mind with what I can do in images, but even more, animations! Thanks for the latest tutorials, my friend! Keep 'em comin' if you can :coolhmm:
Hi, I just found Project Dogwaffle and was wondering. Is there an article about how to move the obj back to Daz after painting it? I'm looking for something to paint clothing I make.
Thanks
There are numerous ways to paint clothing. One would be to leave the object in DAZ Studio, since that's what it seems you are using, bring your UV Map into Dogwaffle, paint your clothing, and Save it out to a Texture map, which you can then apply to the clothing in DAZ Studio.
Carrara Pro has 3d Paint which actually allows us to select various brushes and paint directly onto the model. It also supports layers. So we can build up layers of textures as we paint. It also supports the use of custom brushes. I have purchased all of the brushes made for Carrara that are sold here at DAZ 3D, and love the process of painting onto a mesh.
DAZ 3D has a lot of Articles Here, that help us in the endeavors of getting custom content into DAZ Studio, as well as UV Mapping information, which is critical if you plan to make clothes or other props - and want them to have good textures.
Outside of Carrara, I do all of my painting in Project Dogwaffle Pro: Howler, and love that too. Any further questions... please ask ;)
There are numerous ways to paint clothing. One would be to leave the object in DAZ Studio, since that's what it seems you are using, bring your UV Map into Dogwaffle, paint your clothing, and Save it out to a Texture map, which you can then apply to the clothing in DAZ Studio.
Carrara Pro has 3d Paint which actually allows us to select various brushes and paint directly onto the model. It also supports layers. So we can build up layers of textures as we paint. It also supports the use of custom brushes. I have purchased all of the brushes made for Carrara that are sold here at DAZ 3D, and love the process of painting onto a mesh.
DAZ 3D has a lot of Articles Here, that help us in the endeavors of getting custom content into DAZ Studio, as well as UV Mapping information, which is critical if you plan to make clothes or other props - and want them to have good textures.
Outside of Carrara, I do all of my painting in Project Dogwaffle Pro: Howler, and love that too. Any further questions... please ask ;)
Thanks, I'm looking for a 3D object painter program. I'm an old pro with corel draw photo paint, I started with it back on very 90's but it's not 3D object friendly. I love Carrara when I used a trial version but it's out of my price range at this time.
Thanks
Mec4d (one of our DAZ 3D Published Artists) sells DeepPaint 2.0 for free ($1 web charge)
Carrara has a very nice 3D Paint built in, and is a very robust modeler as well, neither of which even begin to scratch the surface of the worth of this software.
If you plan to get it, find out the current sale price for Platinum Club members. It's often a very low price for PC members. Then just get the one month of PC and buy Carrara. Right now it's not on sale, so the Pro version (3D Paint only comes in Pro - but Pro is what you want, anyways!) is $549.95, but for PC members it's $285 USD... 48 % off! That's really cheap for this type of software! ;)
If you ever want to know the PC price, just let me know. I'll be a PC Member for the rest of my life, I think! :) Love the deals!