Project Dogwaffle Howler

DADA_universe

A quick question here for Dartanbeck and anyone else who has had some experience working with Howler. How do handle audio? I have an 60 seconds of animation done in Carrara and save as sequenced png, thereby losing the audio of what the character is saying. I did not think that would be a problem since I can synch the audio back in Lightworks which I use for video editing. However, I want to animate some text in Howler in time with the audio so now I need to lip-synch the audio in Howler to get the timing right. Any ideas on how to do this / work with audio files within Howler even if it's just for getting the timing right?

bigh

DADA_universe said:

A quick question here for Dartanbeck and anyone else who has had some experience working with Howler. How do handle audio? I have an 60 seconds of animation done in Carrara and save as sequenced png, thereby losing the audio of what the character is saying. I did not think that would be a problem since I can synch the audio back in Lightworks which I use for video editing. However, I want to animate some text in Howler in time with the audio so now I need to lip-synch the audio in Howler to get the timing right. Any ideas on how to do this / work with audio files within Howler even if it's just for getting the timing right?

try here -

https://www.youtube.com/user/pdhowler

Dartanbeck

DADA_universe said:

A quick question here for Dartanbeck and anyone else who has had some experience working with Howler.

I haven't done any of that. But if I was to, I would use the Carrara scene's peeks on the sound file along the timeline to help me determine which frame to begin, end, animate, etc.,

evilproducer

Dartanbeck said:

DADA_universe said:

A quick question here for Dartanbeck and anyone else who has had some experience working with Howler.

I haven't done any of that. But if I was to, I would use the Carrara scene's peeks on the sound file along the timeline to help me determine which frame to begin, end, animate, etc.,

Sounds to me like he understands that part. I think he wants to know the mechanics of it with the timeline and such.

Dartanbeck

As I've said, I've never really done that sort of thing yet. The timeline is easy to navigate, and you can paint anything (even text) that you want onto any frame you like.
Hmmm... for animating text, without actually e-mailing Philip and asking him how he'd go about it (which often results in a tutorial video on the pdhowler YouTube channel), I'd likely try using the animated brush timeline editor, but that (I believe) requires Howler 9+, but I could be wrong, as that tool is new to me, it could have been there before.

Howler (Dogwaffle in general, as a matter of fact) is very, very brush-centric, where we must often think of using the power of a stored brush, where other software might have you use a layer. But the thing is that we can use many, many things as a brush, even a video file. We can make those animations directly in Howler, or they can come from nearly any other source. Just by running an image through the Howler timeline editor, we can shift it around the frame, apply effects, flip it around, rotate it, blur or sharpen it... you name it... if you have an idea, there's often a way to make it happen, with the right amount of practice.

If I want to simply add subtitle text, however, I save those operations for my production work in Vegas - something I'm also very much a newbie at, but that's where I do that stuff.

In Howler, you can do a lot of things with your selection, and that selection, in Howler, is referred to as "Alpha". Alpha is very powerful in Howler. We can paint using any brush, if you need to. And Dogwaffle can use pretty much anything as a brush.

There are also ways to have your selection animated. Right now, I'm only as far along as using the Rotoscoping Tools within the curve tool to animate selections, but I'm fairly certain that there are more ways than that as well. Once you have a selection, there's a whole menu category full of things that we can do - simply to how the selection behaves - such as having the edges blur, growing or shrinking the selection, apply effects like drop shadow, and more. This becomes amazingly powerful for applying local effects to an image or animation.

Anyways, I'm straying from the subject. I began learning Howler as a fun spare time project by simply watching all of the videos on the pdhowler channel. In doing so, I've discovered that, even though the subject matter of the title of each video is covered, there's often more valuable information demonstrated as well. The thing that I Loved about learning from Philip's videos is that he focuses more on how to do things than making a super-wonderful work of art. This often leads to showing other ways to get the same thing done, which can also lead to more hints about what else can be done - so I revisited many of the videos several times, as Howler is a rather enormous set of opportunities for our renders - animated or not.

I have some Carrara - Howler tutorials on my docket. Then I can show folks what I mean about the Carrara/Howler connection, and how I find them to be wonderful companions to one another. I'm also fairly certain that this question may find several answers within the tutorials as well, as I am more focused on animations. Sorry I cannot be of more immediate help though... not without being really specific about what you want to do.

DADA_universe

bigh said:

DADA_universe said:

A quick question here for Dartanbeck and anyone else who has had some experience working with Howler. How do handle audio? I have an 60 seconds of animation done in Carrara and save as sequenced png, thereby losing the audio of what the character is saying. I did not think that would be a problem since I can synch the audio back in Lightworks which I use for video editing. However, I want to animate some text in Howler in time with the audio so now I need to lip-synch the audio in Howler to get the timing right. Any ideas on how to do this / work with audio files within Howler even if it's just for getting the timing right?

try here -

https://www.youtube.com/user/pdhowler

Thanks bigh.....I'm aware of the youtube channel and I've watched many of the videos a few time over but I've not found something that fits this question. I found that it is possible to launch a media player from inside Howler which can play audio files, but this does not appear on the timeline, so it won't be useful for animation. I've seen how to record audio to work with exposure sheets in traditional style animation, but I'm yet to see what I need, so I'm still searching.

DADA_universe

Dartanbeck said:

As I've said, I've never really done that sort of thing yet. The timeline is easy to navigate, and you can paint anything (even text) that you want onto any frame you like.
Hmmm... for animating text, without actually e-mailing Philip and asking him how he'd go about it (which often results in a tutorial video on the pdhowler YouTube channel), I'd likely try using the animated brush timeline editor, but that (I believe) requires Howler 9+, but I could be wrong, as that tool is new to me, it could have been there before.

Howler (Dogwaffle in general, as a matter of fact) is very, very brush-centric, where we must often think of using the power of a stored brush, where other software might have you use a layer. But the thing is that we can use many, many things as a brush, even a video file. We can make those animations directly in Howler, or they can come from nearly any other source. Just by running an image through the Howler timeline editor, we can shift it around the frame, apply effects, flip it around, rotate it, blur or sharpen it... you name it... if you have an idea, there's often a way to make it happen, with the right amount of practice.

If I want to simply add subtitle text, however, I save those operations for my production work in Vegas - something I'm also very much a newbie at, but that's where I do that stuff.

In Howler, you can do a lot of things with your selection, and that selection, in Howler, is referred to as "Alpha". Alpha is very powerful in Howler. We can paint using any brush, if you need to. And Dogwaffle can use pretty much anything as a brush.

There are also ways to have your selection animated. Right now, I'm only as far along as using the Rotoscoping Tools within the curve tool to animate selections, but I'm fairly certain that there are more ways than that as well. Once you have a selection, there's a whole menu category full of things that we can do - simply to how the selection behaves - such as having the edges blur, growing or shrinking the selection, apply effects like drop shadow, and more. This becomes amazingly powerful for applying local effects to an image or animation.

Anyways, I'm straying from the subject. I began learning Howler as a fun spare time project by simply watching all of the videos on the pdhowler channel. In doing so, I've discovered that, even though the subject matter of the title of each video is covered, there's often more valuable information demonstrated as well. The thing that I Loved about learning from Philip's videos is that he focuses more on how to do things than making a super-wonderful work of art. This often leads to showing other ways to get the same thing done, which can also lead to more hints about what else can be done - so I revisited many of the videos several times, as Howler is a rather enormous set of opportunities for our renders - animated or not.

I have some Carrara - Howler tutorials on my docket. Then I can show folks what I mean about the Carrara/Howler connection, and how I find them to be wonderful companions to one another. I'm also fairly certain that this question may find several answers within the tutorials as well, as I am more focused on animations. Sorry I cannot be of more immediate help though... not without being really specific about what you want to do.

I've actually upgraded to 9.5 with a great coupon from thebest3d.com. Unfortunately there's something on my computer that's stopping Howler from importing png sequences, Howler crashes once I try. I've tried everything, stopped the antivirus, cleared the temp folder, cleaned up the disk, ensured the Howler temp folder exists and is writable, disabled the Corel psp utility, installed and reinstalled several times after deleting the old folder and removing all traces from the system, it still crashes. I can load different brushes and paint as I want, but once I try to load any png sequence, it crashes. I installed Howler 8.2 and it did the same thing. Philip has tried to help but we're yet to figure it out, so that's sort of taken all my concentration for now. Once that's out of the way, I'll return to the audio question.

bigh

DADA_universe said:

Dartanbeck said:

As I've said, I've never really done that sort of thing yet. The timeline is easy to navigate, and you can paint anything (even text) that you want onto any frame you like.
Hmmm... for animating text, without actually e-mailing Philip and asking him how he'd go about it (which often results in a tutorial video on the pdhowler YouTube channel), I'd likely try using the animated brush timeline editor, but that (I believe) requires Howler 9+, but I could be wrong, as that tool is new to me, it could have been there before.

Howler (Dogwaffle in general, as a matter of fact) is very, very brush-centric, where we must often think of using the power of a stored brush, where other software might have you use a layer. But the thing is that we can use many, many things as a brush, even a video file. We can make those animations directly in Howler, or they can come from nearly any other source. Just by running an image through the Howler timeline editor, we can shift it around the frame, apply effects, flip it around, rotate it, blur or sharpen it... you name it... if you have an idea, there's often a way to make it happen, with the right amount of practice.

If I want to simply add subtitle text, however, I save those operations for my production work in Vegas - something I'm also very much a newbie at, but that's where I do that stuff.

In Howler, you can do a lot of things with your selection, and that selection, in Howler, is referred to as "Alpha". Alpha is very powerful in Howler. We can paint using any brush, if you need to. And Dogwaffle can use pretty much anything as a brush.

There are also ways to have your selection animated. Right now, I'm only as far along as using the Rotoscoping Tools within the curve tool to animate selections, but I'm fairly certain that there are more ways than that as well. Once you have a selection, there's a whole menu category full of things that we can do - simply to how the selection behaves - such as having the edges blur, growing or shrinking the selection, apply effects like drop shadow, and more. This becomes amazingly powerful for applying local effects to an image or animation.

Anyways, I'm straying from the subject. I began learning Howler as a fun spare time project by simply watching all of the videos on the pdhowler channel. In doing so, I've discovered that, even though the subject matter of the title of each video is covered, there's often more valuable information demonstrated as well. The thing that I Loved about learning from Philip's videos is that he focuses more on how to do things than making a super-wonderful work of art. This often leads to showing other ways to get the same thing done, which can also lead to more hints about what else can be done - so I revisited many of the videos several times, as Howler is a rather enormous set of opportunities for our renders - animated or not.

I have some Carrara - Howler tutorials on my docket. Then I can show folks what I mean about the Carrara/Howler connection, and how I find them to be wonderful companions to one another. I'm also fairly certain that this question may find several answers within the tutorials as well, as I am more focused on animations. Sorry I cannot be of more immediate help though... not without being really specific about what you want to do.

I've actually upgraded to 9.5 with a great coupon from thebest3d.com. Unfortunately there's something on my computer that's stopping Howler from importing png sequences, Howler crashes once I try. I've tried everything, stopped the antivirus, cleared the temp folder, cleaned up the disk, ensured the Howler temp folder exists and is writable, disabled the Corel psp utility, installed and reinstalled several times after deleting the old folder and removing all traces from the system, it still crashes. I can load different brushes and paint as I want, but once I try to load any png sequence, it crashes. I installed Howler 8.2 and it did the same thing. Philip has tried to help but we're yet to figure it out, so that's sort of taken all my concentration for now. Once that's out of the way, I'll return to the audio question.

can you load one png ?
can you load png in other programs ?
can you save a png ?
can Philip load png using his puter ?

Dartanbeck

Also (including bigh's suggestions directly above), have you tried importing just a few of the frames instead of all of them? Just a hint, Howler is not 64 bit, so we must be careful what size resolutions we use. For my animations, I have no problem as I run at 1280 x 720, but when I tried to make an animated spherical background at 8,000 x 4,000 I couldn't do it.
I mention this because it seems that many artists these days are going for ultra high resolution, and Howler is not ready to support that right now. That doesn't mean, however, that we cannot use Howler's amazing features on ultra high res stuff, we just cannot do it 'at' ultra high res. But we can create effects and such that can be brought in using other software that can handle the higher resolutions, like Carrara.

DADA_universe

bigh said:

DADA_universe said:

Dartanbeck said:

As I've said, I've never really done that sort of thing yet. The timeline is easy to navigate, and you can paint anything (even text) that you want onto any frame you like.
Hmmm... for animating text, without actually e-mailing Philip and asking him how he'd go about it (which often results in a tutorial video on the pdhowler YouTube channel), I'd likely try using the animated brush timeline editor, but that (I believe) requires Howler 9+, but I could be wrong, as that tool is new to me, it could have been there before.

Howler (Dogwaffle in general, as a matter of fact) is very, very brush-centric, where we must often think of using the power of a stored brush, where other software might have you use a layer. But the thing is that we can use many, many things as a brush, even a video file. We can make those animations directly in Howler, or they can come from nearly any other source. Just by running an image through the Howler timeline editor, we can shift it around the frame, apply effects, flip it around, rotate it, blur or sharpen it... you name it... if you have an idea, there's often a way to make it happen, with the right amount of practice.

If I want to simply add subtitle text, however, I save those operations for my production work in Vegas - something I'm also very much a newbie at, but that's where I do that stuff.

In Howler, you can do a lot of things with your selection, and that selection, in Howler, is referred to as "Alpha". Alpha is very powerful in Howler. We can paint using any brush, if you need to. And Dogwaffle can use pretty much anything as a brush.

There are also ways to have your selection animated. Right now, I'm only as far along as using the Rotoscoping Tools within the curve tool to animate selections, but I'm fairly certain that there are more ways than that as well. Once you have a selection, there's a whole menu category full of things that we can do - simply to how the selection behaves - such as having the edges blur, growing or shrinking the selection, apply effects like drop shadow, and more. This becomes amazingly powerful for applying local effects to an image or animation.

Anyways, I'm straying from the subject. I began learning Howler as a fun spare time project by simply watching all of the videos on the pdhowler channel. In doing so, I've discovered that, even though the subject matter of the title of each video is covered, there's often more valuable information demonstrated as well. The thing that I Loved about learning from Philip's videos is that he focuses more on how to do things than making a super-wonderful work of art. This often leads to showing other ways to get the same thing done, which can also lead to more hints about what else can be done - so I revisited many of the videos several times, as Howler is a rather enormous set of opportunities for our renders - animated or not.

I have some Carrara - Howler tutorials on my docket. Then I can show folks what I mean about the Carrara/Howler connection, and how I find them to be wonderful companions to one another. I'm also fairly certain that this question may find several answers within the tutorials as well, as I am more focused on animations. Sorry I cannot be of more immediate help though... not without being really specific about what you want to do.

I've actually upgraded to 9.5 with a great coupon from thebest3d.com. Unfortunately there's something on my computer that's stopping Howler from importing png sequences, Howler crashes once I try. I've tried everything, stopped the antivirus, cleared the temp folder, cleaned up the disk, ensured the Howler temp folder exists and is writable, disabled the Corel psp utility, installed and reinstalled several times after deleting the old folder and removing all traces from the system, it still crashes. I can load different brushes and paint as I want, but once I try to load any png sequence, it crashes. I installed Howler 8.2 and it did the same thing. Philip has tried to help but we're yet to figure it out, so that's sort of taken all my concentration for now. Once that's out of the way, I'll return to the audio question.

can you load one png ?
can you load png in other programs ?
can you save a png ?
can Philip load png using his puter ?

Thanks Bigh and Dart...trust me to find a bug that is not being replicated at Philip's end, we've exchanged 31 emails on this, his patience is amazing. Here's a peek into the crux of our troubleshooting spree:

I've done some further testing along the lines you've suggested here.
can you do a couple of brush strokes of painting and then undo and use image...store? YES
can you for instance create an avi from the menu animation create, and then save it as an image sequence out on the animation menu- YES
and make sure it is not in PNG format and it is a quick and small. save it as the default target format TGA. YES
can you then load that image sequence back? NO!

I've been able to paint with brushes, store image, save as dwa animation, load the dwa animation, save as avi, load saved avi, load other avi files (I noticed that it only loads up to an upper threshold of 4,000 frames before it fails and returns an error message- 'can not load animation', but I ascribe this to limits with the memory handling), I am able to load the tga sequence as an animated brush (havent learnt how to use that too well), it appears every other thing in Howler works fine.

Clearly the problem is not with the image format as the crash happens while even trying to navigate to the folder I want to load the sequence from. I think we can narrow down the problem to this: once I click on load sequence under the animation tab, the window that drops down for navigating to where the folder containing the sequence is located causes Howler to crash at one point or the other. Previously I got to load the sequence once or twice before it crashed, now it just crashes once I try to load any sequence, and clearly the crash is not dependent on the image format.

I've got Microsoft.NET framework 4.5.1 installed on my laptop.
I could not locate any .net framework for the other laptop, but maybe I don't know how to check. It also appear to have only the onboard intel display graphics, but again, I may be wrong. My primary concern though is my own laptop which is where I do all may work.

Thanks, I took off .net 4.5.2 and installed 4.0 (had done it before but just tried it again anyway). It didn't change anything. Single pngs load from File -> Import -> load to stored without problem. Apparently a sequence can't be loaded that way. Same thing with using the general file converter, etc. The problem has not happened anywhere else apart from when trying to load sequenced pngs. It looks like once something triggers it off, it becomes difficult to reset, not even deleting temp files and re-installing Howler makes a difference. Still hunting!

DADA_universe

Dartanbeck said:

Also (including bigh's suggestions directly above), have you tried importing just a few of the frames instead of all of them? Just a hint, Howler is not 64 bit, so we must be careful what size resolutions we use. For my animations, I have no problem as I run at 1280 x 720, but when I tried to make an animated spherical background at 8,000 x 4,000 I couldn't do it.
I mention this because it seems that many artists these days are going for ultra high resolution, and Howler is not ready to support that right now. That doesn't mean, however, that we cannot use Howler's amazing features on ultra high res stuff, we just cannot do it 'at' ultra high res. But we can create effects and such that can be brought in using other software that can handle the higher resolutions, like Carrara.

I used 1280 x 720 as well, I'm yet to have any need for ultra high definition so I should escape those troubles for a while. This current snag seems unconnected to image size though.

DADA_universe

Update on the above.
From the trouble shooting with Philip, the most likely culprits (big no no's for Howler which should be kept in mind anyway) were:
1. The .net framework (version 4.0 must definitely be installed whether higher or lower versions are installed or not. (Installing .net 4.0 together with the .net 4.5.2 I had originally did not fix it)
2. The protexis license utility from Corel might be killing Howler. (Disabling this did not fix it)
3. The antivirus might be killing the image conversion utility in Howler. (Disabling the antivirus did not fix it)

It obviously had something to do with the image conversion utility inside Howler and the file loading menu which was freezing anytime I tried to load image sequences from the animation tab. Philip made us confirm this by leading me through several of the options for importing / loading / handling images in Howler. Each one worked apart from the problematic one. Eventually we gave up after 2.5 hours of touring Howler, and oh my, had I learnt so much! Started out as a troubleshooting session but ended up as a rapid condensed tutorial. Great app indeed.

Workarounds settled for:
1. Find something to convert the image sequence to lossless (uncompressed) Avi's (good enough Carrara can reingest it's own image sequeces and spit them out again as Avi's) and load the Avi's under the animation tab. (Not most desirable because image sequences are desirable for being image sequences in the first place and the conversion process is liable to still drop some quality anyway.)
2. Loading the sequence frame by frame.....*just kidding....;o)
3. The solution that finally proved most useful:

Look in the Timeline, after creating an animation with Animation -> Create...

Under the Filters of the Timeline editor, there's a group for COmpositing (near the bottom of the list of filters): Composite with sequence

Look for the one called Color key sequence.

The way it works is that you have some animation, and any pixel from the animation that matches the specified color will be transparent and instead use the color from the image sequence files.

So for example, initialize your images to be all black in the animation you create. Then you can use this Compositing mode and select the PNG files you want to composite nto the animation. Select the first of the images in your sequence. Make sure the color key is the same as the color in the main animation that you want to replace with your file sequence's pixel's colors. (e.g. black). Then click Apply in the upper right of the Timeline editor. That will essentially replace all pixels from each frame with the corresponding pixels from your PNG sequence.

Make sure the animation is of the same dimensions as your PNG sequence.

That worked like a charm, loaded sequences without any issues unlike the 'load sequence' option under the animation tab which was crashing Howler. So though the original problem is still a mystery (most likely localised to my own system set up and not a generic problem with Howler) we found a way to side-step it.

So there you have it. Two more discoveries here in case anyone is searching for something related:
1. Concerning animating in Howler to synch with audio, my suspicion was right, it can be done with the Exposure sheet (close to the bottom, under the Animation tab), albeit that's not exactly what it's meant for. Phillip demonstrated how you could paint / draw over your animation frames via the exposure sheet which plays back your audio (ostensibly for lip syncing). So there, it's possible.

2. I had an issue with Howler covering the task bar on my PC when maximized. It had always been like that even when I used the demo version, didn't know how to get around that till I stumbled on the fix! There's a 'compact full screen button' under the 'window' tab in Howler. It's the first from the top. Apparently it stayed ticked on my system till I stumbled on it and unpicked it, which then made Howler uncover the task bar and sit properly in it's own window. Thought to share.

Alright, bye for now. Special thanks to Philip Staiger for exceptional customer service you probably wouldn't get from software companies that charge an arm and a leg for their products. Thanks to him, I'm a whole lot more comfortable with my choice to settle for Howler.

DADA_universe

Still on the deal spotting tip.....Howler 9.5 has now landed in Carrara land.

Dartanbeck

DADA_universe said:

Still on the deal spotting tip.....Howler 9.5 has now landed in Carrara land.

Awesome! Phantastique deal!!!

Dartanbeck

Okay, I don't want to keep doing Howler stuff in Roygee's fine Bryce Terrains in Carrara thread, so I'll put these updates here ;)

HeadWax wanted to see some of the new 3D Designer OBJ exports in Carrara, after I was mentioning that Howler 9.5 now offers that option, and a whole lot more. Here's what I've logged in that thread.

In my DCG Plugins thread, I was messing around with some functions and found a cool "Pipes" function from Enhance C plugin shader options. Well I took the image that I posted in that thread and brought it into 3D Designer 9.5 just for fun. Exported the obj, imported into Carrara, duplicated it a few times, gave it a simple texture, lights and fog (low volumetric cloud) and shot a render:

Dartanbeck

Remembering a recent video done by Dan Ritchie, I went ahead and played around a bit making a nurbs picture. I think that he was using it for Puppy Ray, which is also very freaking cool, by the way, but I'm on a 3D Designer kick, so in it went.
Didn't play with it much... just set the amplitude a bit and exported the resulting model and brought it into Carrara. I wanted to keep the whole thing pretty low, so the image I used was pretty dark. So I made a new image for the texture and one for the bump (again, in my wonderful Howler 9.5 blissful toolbox!) and slid then easily onto my object, added some atmosphere and lights, duplicated it around some, and here we have a very quick throw-together. I can't wait to actually spend some time at this!

Dkgoose

I've seen this for a while and downloaded a free copy from one of the Christmas giveaways, originally I thought it would let you paint on 3d textures but seen it was mostly for landscapes which is cool, so would this be used for background postwork?

Dartanbeck

You can also use it in the background/backdrop within Carrara as well.

The image above is actually a Carrara render though. Here's how:

I painted a crazy pattern in Howler and saved the image, then opened it in the 3d designer in Howler and messed around with the setting that manipulated the 3d result, while ignoring or even turning off some features that are used for making a final picture in Howler.

Once I got the 3d result I wanted, I exported the obj (new feature in the latest, greatest, Howler 9.5)

In Carrara, I imported the obj and applied the image as a texture and tiled it quite a lot, then copied that into the bump channel and cranked the bump amplitude up a lot.

The really cool thing about doing this in Howler is the fact that it's so dog gone fast. A lot of it is GPU optimized now, which helps tremendously when it comes to adding minute details in 3d designer. Erosion takes such a toll on my system in Carrara's terrain editor that I often crash. But in Howler, it just rams right through those bazillions of calculations with the help of my graphics card! Sweet!

Dartanbeck

This image (previous page, last post) is another obj exported from Howler and rendered in Carrara, but that one was replicated a bunch of times, and bears a simple procedural shader that I spent no time on (took it straight from the Carrara sample shaders library)

This was all just to take a quick look at the idea of using the new obj export option in Howler 9.5 because the idea totally excites me. ut the 3D designer is also useful for making elevation maps for use in the Carrara terrain editor. Once you paint (or open) the elevation map, you can view it and set various magnitudes and such within the 3D Designer. If you like the elevation map as it is, simply exit the 3D Designer and save the map as it is. But you can really further tweak the map directly within 3D Designer and, instead of exporting the obj, export the now resulting height map. Howler now include a plethora of export options, including a depth map of the current camera angle, which can provide many uses for various effects.

Dan Ritchie is an Effects and animation extraordinaire as well as being a pretty darned good painter. So he keeps pushing the envelope for us Dogwaffle users. He wanted to give us something different - instead of another PS look-alike software. Well... different is what we got... and I like it a lot better than any other painter that I've ever tried. Me = Howler fan!

Dkgoose

those look cool, maybe i'll get the upgrade to 9.5 while the sale is still going on, maybe in the future they'll add the 3d painting and offer a side grade to whatever they will call that version :)

Dartanbeck

After seeing the "New Features" lists since Howler 7.2, it's hard to predict what might happen. This software makes some very different changes! ;)
Radical, even!

Also, the upgrade deals are always so minimal compared to so many other software applications. Gotta love these guys!

I also think it's neat how they still offer older versions at really low prices. It allows us to look at the feature changes and decide for ourselves whether we need the latest and greatest, or can settle for a few versions back for much less... pretty cool, and pretty much unheard of from other developers - at least to this degree.

And then, as if that isn't enough, there's Howler vs Artist. Howler has all of the animation bells and whistles for people like me, and Artist is the same thing but without the animation menu. It still has features that can be animated within the program, like animated brushes and stuff like that, but it won't let you open, edit, and save avi or sequenced image animation projects like Howler. So that's where we're starting to see version differences. Like at the time of this writing, there isn't a 9.5 version of artist because so many of the changes made are tied heavily into having animation possibilities. Knowing Dan Ritchie (developer) though, I have a feeling that he'll be able to pull off a beautiful Artist 9.5 with all of this bliss as well. He's really quite amazing, so I love to contribute to his cause.

Dartanbeck

Here are some Doggy Waffling links:

Features Lists - In the panel on the right, you can select which version you'd like to see the New Features for.

Here at DAZ 3D - Check out how you can get older versions for really low prices. I have't tried it (or even asked about it yet), but they even sell the Particles brushes as a separate application. I wonder what that's like? But I'm quite certain that it won't have the latest additions included to the particles system in Howler 9.5! Now we can have the particles use Ambient Occlusion shadowing and some other new stuff (can't remember off hand what all was done to particles, but I do recall having a lot of fun trying some of it!). Five bucks for Dogwaffle 3.5 Pro or Artist 2 (Powered by PD Pro 6 - I believe PD Pro 6 was the last version of Dogwaffle Pro to not carry the name of Howler) - It looks like 3.5 Pro has some animation menu features, but nowhere near what went into Howler (PD Pro 7 - Howler) and I wonder how cool PD Pro 5.1b is for only twenty-five dollars!

There are some fun comparisons of the different versions at theBest3d dot com, the home of Dogwaffle marketing, I think. Then Daniel has his own site at squirreldome. Fun stuff.

After I began my voyage into learning Dogwaffle (it's certainly not another Photoshop knock-off, but a whole new realm to get to know and learn how to use) I have been absolutely amazed at how helpful the Project Dogwaffle team are to their followers. As I say in my first post of this thread, theBest3d dot com is packed with advice and links to help anyone whom might be interested in digital graphics ideas and solutions with just about any subject. Philip Staiger (Staigerman here at DAZ 3D) is theBest3d dot com, and he is also responsible for most of the instructional videos at the pdhowler YouTube channel. We don't (yet) have an official forum for Dogwaffle here at DAZ, so I've started this thread and sometimes Philip will chime in. In my endeavor to learn, I contacted him and he pointed me to some videos on the channel - and also made some new videos as other folks questions cropped up. He is very responsive to helping us to learn the software to a point where he, himself has learned it inside and out - I have no clue how he does his other job, whatever that may be.

In addition to this thread and the YouTube channel, we also have a Dogwaffle Yahoo Group, where we can get very timely feedback to questions, comments, and anything Dogwaffle, which is a great way to meet new Waffling friends. Unfortunately for me, my on-line time has been drastically limited lately - something I'm working very hard to try and change.

I was mentioning how helpful they can be... check this out. I can never remember how to actually navigate to this page, so I have a link to it on the first post of this thread, but here it is again so I can show this to you. This is an Amazing, Exhausting List of links to Graphical Resources and Stuff! It's so exhaustive that it exhausts me! LOL... I love to come in here and peruse links. Some of them may now be defunct - perhaps. But if so, they can at least give us clues of names that we can Google or whatever. Just an amazing resource list on a single page.

Anyways... I have made it a hobby in its own to head to the pdhowler YouTube channel and just kick back and enjoy a set of videos. I would keep track of where I left off and continue on, often repeating the last one before continuing, or even just repeating a whole set of them. There's a lot of useful information given - and Howler does take some getting used to - changes in how we go about doing things. Philip goes through it all in a very entertaining and exploratory style that makes it fun. Some of the most useful knowledge for me in the beginning was to note down which video titles contained info for what I wanted to learn, and then go into Howler and conduct what Philip was teaching. Worked like a charm! One of the biggest deals for me was to just stop thinking in terms of "Layers" (like you do in PS, PaintShop Pro, Gimp, etc.,) and instead get into working with, and managing brushes and stored images. It's a whole new way of working and, for me, is revealing a more powerful array of endless options - very artful.

Dartanbeck

...and I also watched ALL of the videos, not just the ones that I thought I might be interested in. I have made some playlists that I link to on the first post of this thread, but that is not a complete list of all of the videos. It was a great help to get me going though, and where that left off, and the newer videos poured in since those listed for "New for Howler 8", I just kept watching, and watching, and watching.

It could be that I just find Philip to be very entertaining. It may also be that I enjoy watching how he tinkers with his projects. I don't always watch them simply to learn anymore, but often just to enjoy a good show, because his topics interest me.

Admittedly, I use Howler quite a bit differently than how Philip uses it... and the same applies to our use of Carrara - we are very different. But in watching him patiently explain his actions and seeing the results, my mind comes alive with how these functions will make my own work so much better than it would have been if I didn't get to know how to use Howler for my animations. I really love how this software works. It's my main art room along with Carrara now. My other image editing software is helpful to have, but I rarely use it anymore.

Dartanbeck

Oh yeah!!!
Check out some beautiful and far out imagery and paintings in the new PD Pro: Howler 9.6 video trailer!!!
Some of that magnificent artwork has been done focusing on just a few of the amazing filters and brushes available right from the interface while others may have taken a considerable amount of time, patience, and practice to pull off the magic involved. Either way, and anywhere in between, the video does really help to illustrate some of the power behind the Dogwaffle Project's ultimate child, the soon to be released Howler 9.6!
Some of the shots were done in much earlier releases of the software, though some are made using some of the incredible new advancements made in this latest version.

What's New in 9.6?
Version 9.6 of the natural media paint and animation program designed for visual effects work is now available. The new version is focused on improving the user experience on different kinds of hardware ranging from tablets to workstations, and adding new tools that are critical to visual effects, particularly in video content creation.

Great new feature! The duplicate video frame repair toolkit:
The new duplicate frame tool lets you manage video that has been damaged due to dropped frames or improper transcoding.
The tool helps you to find dropped or duplicate frames, then lets you manage them, either by deleting them, or interpolating new in-between frames via motion prediction technology.
See this video for more info

Other new features:
- Revamped greenscreen compositing tool with color matrix adjustments. See video

- Revamped camera stabilization/tracking and camera motion removal/restoration tool.

- Revamped navigation: Zoom from pointer location instead of to the center of screen. Optional scrollbars for when the CTRL-Shift navigation isn't possible, such as on tablets.

- New Vector Blur filter. See Video

- New easy garbage masking for video using Alt key + rectangle/ellipse tools. This applies the rectangle or oval fill tools across all frames of an animation or video See Video

- New benchmarking tool, the Dogmark. Use Howler to test the speed of different processors using academic image processing functions.

- Tools for single point matchmoving.

- Support for higher resolution monitors: Fewer stacked panels at the top of the screen when a 1080p or higher-resolution monitor is available.

- Revamped and animatable rubber sheet tool. (4 corner perspective warp) See Video

- GUI tweaks. Menu links to free transform tools for image and alpha.

- Color replacer had an issue when animating h/s/v changes. See Video

- added CPU fallback for foliage ambient occlusion that was only available on GPU previously.

Reminder: Howler 9.6 is a pay update to those using versions 9.2 and earlier. However, a special discount price is available. Those who previously upgraded to version 9.5 will receive 9.6 for free. The upgrade discount is available to users of all versions, excluding free versions.

Using Howler as an Animation Tool?

[url= http://youtu.be/1UVdGfZ4I_c]Here is a short summary

Where can you learn more?

www.squirreldome.com

Where else?

Click here for more features info

Dartanbeck

TheBest3D

Let us show you how to paint, animate and work with video and 3D

Game Development

Headwax

well dont stop :)

Milo

Anyone know of any good Painting Demos or tutorials with Howler?

Headwax

I think dart has a big list, too big :) the makers are very flexible and would love to point you in the right direction

Headwax

pm Staigerman http://www.daz3d.com/forums/profile/89385/staigerman

Dartanbeck

There are many tutorials in the below link, but I think what you're looking for is called "painting an orange", which is an excellent example of just painting a picture from a blank canvas. Picking colors and mixing them, developer Daniel Ritchie takes you through the whole painting, start to finish, and he's rather good! :) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXrNZxsK3Q4lVPT1iUURZTuuvScgedO_k A little higher up on the list is one about speed painting an archaic b