The Amazing PD Howler Dogwaffle Tips, Tricks, and Discussion Thread
Diomede
Posts: 15,182
PD Howler 11 available here in the Daz store opens amazing possibilities.
https://www.daz3d.com/pd-artist-11-powered-by-project-dogwaffle
and
https://www.daz3d.com/pd-howler-11-1
But I need help!
Please use this thread to share your Howler. Ask questions. Post artwork. Offer tutorials. Share news. In other words, this is the PD Howler and related art thread.
This is software for creative minds. It runs on PC with Windows 7, 8.1 and 11. (older Windows OSes are not supported though it may still work in part but not for the GPU based tools).
PD Howler is the top-of-the-line edition from Project Dogwaffle, created by brought to you by Dan Ritchie (Squirreldome.com) and Philip Staiger (TheBest3D.com), a former Amapi evangelist at Eovia who loves Carrara, 3D, pixels and working with still images as well as animations and videos.
PD Howler now includes GPU-based rendering of 3D landscapes, starting easily from an image-based elevation map. The 3D Designer can create the terrain and enhance it with erosion, sediments and more. Export to OBJ files, or save the modified heightmap for re-use in other tools and game engines. PuppyRay renders fast and very real looking landscapes, and you can then paint on them with foliage brushes for added details. The Particle Modeler is great for animated volumetric puffy clouds and now also supports the use of sprites, even animated sprites, to create fun flocks of birds, schools of fish and more. Renderin the water plane in PuppyRay includes realistic details like: true Fresnel to transition between reflection vs. refraction, absorption based on depth to loose the red, green and eventually bue channels; scattering to add a hint of milky or murky dirty suspension in the water; ground-level fog; wet darkening of the rocks and sandy areas near the water; caustics from the Sun projected down to the ocean floor;
But it's not just about 3D landscapes and water or skies and clouds. PD Howler also has tools to fix videos, such as repairing missing frames due to encoding, dropped frames. And motion-estimated interpolation for super-slow motion; And numerous special effects filters, not just over a single mage, but also over image sequences of an animation, a video.
And of course, it is a paint program too. You can load an image as a custom brush, even an animation such as image sequence or avi video can be the brush with which you paint over another image or into another video(!). That animbrush can hold a looking animation that you created in Daz Studio or Carrara or Bryce, Poser and many other tools, or image frames that you drew by hand.
There are also tools for cartooning, exposure sheets, and numerous fun effects, lens flares for your muzzles and gun battles and extra-solar art with multiple bright stars and such.
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Comments
Will be watching with interest. I picked up the PD Artist (little brother I think lol). I have no idea where to start on this one but will be checking in for some tips and tricks.
+1
Hello! Thank you Diomede for the wonderful introduction for PD Howler and PD Artist!
As for where to start, I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCokbGIIM9CTT35_B2erkjIg/videos
These are beginner videos to get to know the interface and the work for both Artist and Howler. After you have a working knowledge of the GUI, then start checking out:
https://www.youtube.com/user/pdhowler/videos
There are more advanced videos and some of the amazing things you can do with PD!
And if you want to really get into it, there are PD Howler videos under the vendor Digital Art Live.
I am happy to answer questions as they come up, but I have to admit that I don't check here as often as I should, I'll try to do better!
There is a live webinar coming up in December (15th) through Digital Art Live.com about creating urban scenes with PD Howler (Artist will be able to do all the same things that will be covered).
Philip Steigar and Dan Ritchie are amazing, one for programming and one for doing videos and promoting! I bow to their excellence.
I've been using PD Howler since it was named Project Dogwaffle and was free. So, while I certainly don't know everything, I have a good knowledge of it, and use it in my artistic work flow whether for art in and of itself or for creating textures, doing postwork and creating promos. It's exceedingly versatile!
See ya all around!
And to continue: Drop a created background from PD Howler into Daz Studio to render faster than a modelled background.
The background for this image was rendered in PuppyRay the 3d engine in PD Howler and PD Artist. Then it was painted with particles from the Foliage and Particles brushes. Then I dropped this in DS and added the characters (horse, girl, butterflys) and rendered that. Then I took that image back in to Howler and added the lens flare rainbow and more particle grass and fixed a couple of poke-throughs on the dress.
I just picked up the digital art live video today - I only have the pd Artist at the moment but am hoping to pick up some useful tips anyway. I almost never render with a background, I add 98% of my backgrounds in post, so I am very interested in creating my own fantasy backgrounds.
Thanks for these examples, Tiffanie. I like the idea of being able to integrate the terrain functions, watery reflections, painterly brushes, and so much more. Always so much more to learn.
The post work one or the landscape one? The landscape one would have more of what you would be looking for, so hopefully that one. And EVERYTHING that is in the video applies to PD Artist. There are only a couple of differences between the two, the biggest difference is Artist doesn't have the Animation capabilities. So, you should get a lot of use out of it! Hope you enjoy!.
I have an advanced video at another store, but can't mention it here. That is more about direct painting with little or no rendering, and some advanced techniques for landscapes.
I look forward to seeing some of your art!
Without a doubt!
Yes the landscape one, i'm relatlively confident in my post work skills, although I am always more than willing to learn new things and there is always room for improvement., one can never have too much knowledge! And I am always interested in seeing how other people do things.
For anyone who might be interested, I'm doing a live event (Webinar) sponsored by Digital Art Live on December 15th on the subject of creating Urban scapes using JSplacement and PD Howler/Artist.
You will be able to see 3 different city scenes done while you watch.
A modern one, A futuristic/or Fantasy one and a spooky/horror/ruins type one.
And it will be a great chance to ask questions about Howler and Artist and get answers (and maybe even some demos) right away. Like a mini private lesson!
If you aren't interested, then pass this on to someone who might be, please?
www.digitalartlive.com
And hopefully this will be accepted by Daz for the store after the recording, but there are no guarentees for that!
Thanks! This will be my only announcement on this
Sounds great, I will try and make that one!
Awesome! I look forward to seeing you there!
Here's the official event poster and event page where you can find more detail about what Tiffanie will be presenting...
https://digitalartlive.com/event/pd-howler-how-to-create-stunning-city-scenes/
The webinar went quite well, and we are hoping that Daz will pick up the recording for the store.
Any other questions that folks have, let me know!
I couldn't make it to the live one but I plan on picking this one up when it hits the store. I'm glad it went well!
Just found out it has been accepted, will be out sometime in the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out!
How to Create City Scenes is in the store today!
If you get it and have questions after going through the video, please ask away! I'm happy to help with issues you may be having.
Tiffanie ROCKS at teaching/tutorialing Project Dogwaffle and is VERY savvy with the software!
Back when I first started kicking around the idea of getting Howler for my animation needs, I started a rambling thread about it in the Carrara discussion forum, so if you want to read some crazy babbling about my thought process before buying, and enthusiasm/learning experience after buying PD Pro: Howler, feel free to head over there:
► Project Dogwaffle Howler in the Carrara Discussion Forum
...and in that first post, I have a link to my table of contents explaining my various playlists I've made to help myself learn the ropes
► My Playlists of his YouTube tutorials
Now, I must say that it took a little bit to wrap my head around the way Project Dogwaffle works, as it is not meant to replicate any other specific image editor. It's its own, wonderful art room full of stuff for artists to be creative with.
After getting just good enough to where I could do my usual image editing in it, I quickly got to a point where Project Dogwaffle is truly my goto app for image editing, image creation, and all manner of other things that might do better with a touch of artistic flair!
Tiffanie's tutorials are SO wonderful at teaching some really important essentials about the software and so I highly recommend soaking in as many of those as you can. She totally ROCKS!
The playlists I link to above are of videos mostly made by our very own Philip Staiger, who also totally ROCKS! The few that aren't Philip are from our beloved creator of Dogwaffle, Mr. Dan Ritchie, who totally freaking ROCKS! He's an amazing artist and he's also CONSTANTLY updating and upgrading the software making it better, faster, more complete, more creative, and an even better value than ever - and it's always been one of those BEST values for artists available on planet Earth.
Rock On, and Rock with Project Dogwaffle!
And Dartanbeck has enough enthusiam for 10 people! I really appreciate him, in return!
I do often wonder exactly what Dogwaffle is, IS it an alternative to Photoshop?
I do not know, if Howler is an alternative to Photoshop, but one can do a lot in this program,
like painting, filtering images and making some 3D stuff as well.
I like it very much, but have not used it that much, as I wish to.
Those tutorials from DigitalArtLive come handy and I plan to watch them again and again
until I get a grasp of that amazing program.
@ Artini - Thank you for the compliment!
@ Chohole - It was more like an alternative to Corel Paint, with a lot of other things thrown in. I came from a traditional art medium side and wanted to find a computer program that could do things like water color and oils because I had 5 small children and I wanted something non-toxic and that I could stop at a moment to answer a call of emergency, without worrying about the mess left behind or whether I covered the paint. Corel was SO expensive (remember I had 5 small children!) So I kept looking and found DogWaffle and it was free!
That got me started with it. And I really liked all the brushes! And at the time I knew nothing about PhotoShop, so layers weren't important, and as a traditional artist, you don't use layers usually anyway! So, I stuck with it, and as the various iterations continued I learned more and more! I tried GIMP once or twice, was even given an old copy of PS, but they all seemed so much harder to work with, and it was hard to figure out how to do the things that I wanted to do with them which were easy in Howler. What can Howler do?
It can do photomanipulations.
It is very brush-centric, which is a little hard to wrap your mind around aparently when you come from traditional digital environs
It does have filters
It does have height map -> 3d render capabilities, and can render some 3d objects (he's working on improving that)
It has a particle painting system
It papers, brushes, and dynamic media brushes
It has layers and a swap image (swap is like flipping the paper over and scribbling on the back and you can use it in a number of other ways, like rubbing a crayon overa piece of paper on a tombstone to get the dates)
It has the ability to use png images in the brush, so you can convert those abrs to png and use them in Howler
It has a clock and a media player and a space shooter game
It can use Lua scripting language
It can render textures of various sorts
It can do traditional animation Rotoscoping, and has the ability to do Green Screen/Blue Screen/And Onion skin tracing
It can do camera stabilization and interpolative animation
It can do special effects over a video
It has artist guides and rulers
You can create and save various palletes of color, as well as it having a number of color systems to choose from and it even has a pallete where you can mix your own colors, just like an oil painter.
It can do some batch processes with images
It has a separate program built inside that does near vector type art
It does mirror, but also does kalidescopes of up to 10 divisions for making mandalas and such
It works with tablets, with pressure and opacity, But you can adjust the brush settings so that mouse can have nearly the same versitility!
It does text
It makes custom brushes
That's what I can remember off the top of my head.
What it doesn't do:
The layers are semi-transparent (like water color or glazing) and it doesn't have opaque layers like Photoshop. There are a few work arounds, to get near opaque layers.
It is 32 bit, and while you can do some more work arounds, it doesn't have the memory access that 64 bit would. The creator would have to completly redo the code to go to 64 bit, and he doesn't have the time or money to do so presently. There is only 1 guy doing all this.
It doesn't use abr or gbr brushes natively
It doesn't do PS actions natively (but you could write a Lua script to do some)
It doesn't cost and arm and a leg and it's not on subscription, you own it.
As I don't use PS, like I said above, I'm sure there may be other things, but I don't know about them, so I can't say.
Hope that helps.
P.S. Any other questions I'm happy to help!
Hi Tiffani, thanks for the list.!
Does it do paintovers?
Ie can you bring your render in, add a layer on top, and then paint on that layer while picking up the underlying colours of the base layer?
that would be a winner for many artists
Sorry, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Would it transfer the colors from below to mix with the brush use above? Sort of, depending on how you set the layer blending.
Could you use the colors from the image as a color picker to paint? Yes, just save it as a stored image and activate the dropper on the stored image.
If you painted directly on the layer above, it will still show the image below. Think, like glazing in Oil painting, Or painting over dried watercolor with more watercolor.
If it's something else you are asking, then I'm not understanding you, so give me more examples!
Been doing a little playing around.
A type of Pointilism created from a rendered image, with painted background. The original in the next post, since I can't figure out how to post 2 images in the same message. Or how to put full size images in the post....
The original
Painted cosmos and Magic Moonrise
And a waterworks.
If folks have questions...hit me up!
Well, since there haven't been any questions, I thought I'd drop a couple of videos here that talk about the interface (for Howler and Artist) and some about brushes. And maybe that will engender some questions. If nothing else, folks can ask me to do videos on other subjects.