you can fly!?  Project Dogwaffle 3:

What's new in PD Pro?
up

There are many new features in PD Pro (Project Dogwaffle 3). This page illustrates the use of some of them.

This is not a complete list, but it should give an idea of what's new and why it's a new major release. There are a number of new filters, speed improvements (e.g. with fractal particle brushes (optipustics), and much more. A number of significant enhancements are related to creating and working on animations:

Animated Fisheye Filter fx



The filmstrip:

New filmstrip mode on the animation control panel.
Animation Control bar with filmstrip enabled
- Context menu pops up with additional options (right-click on filmstrip).
- Set in/out points for copying blocks of frames.


the new Animation Menu:

Animation menu
- Time stretch (with blending!) - twice / half the number of frames...




- reverse frame sequence (!)

You can reverse the frame sequence of your animation. For example, if you have an animation clip showing a glass falling down and shattering into pieces, but you really want to show it 'backwards', use this new feature to reverse the frame sequence. This can be a great tool as a companion for animations made with 3D tools, perhaps based on physics calculations. After the rendering, reversing the movie is a snap.

example (all rendered and animated in PD Pro): 
before reversal: snowfall effect, camera looking down
after reversal: underwater bubbles, now looking up

 >> view snowfall   >> view underwater


- de-interlace (extract fields to frames)
- re-interlace right on the filmstrip.
- cut/copy/paste/insert/replace
- copy block/cut block/insert block for animation.





New gradient tools:
the circular fill gradient has a new behavior. It lets you center the hotspot.
There are several new fill modes. warp vert, warp both, etc.
There are fill modes for the gradient tools under the linear tool.
There's a new Lightning fx in the linear tool! (see more below)


the new gradient tool
new gradient tool
New filters:
- New photographic filters. These are the kinds of filters you'd put on
  the front of a camera's lens.  


Here are some examples:


Light Diffusion

Fisheye

Fog (applied 3 times)

Sunset (3x)

Day for night

Here are some more examples of things you can do:
Lake effect #1: At left, the original picture. The second picture was changed by applying the sunset filter several times. Another filter (Mystic Vision) was then added to enhance the sunray effect. Finally, from the Buffer menu, the option "Expand Dynamic Range" was selected.

Lake effect #2: In this example, the fog effect filter was applied several times. Notice that it's possible to use an alpha mask in order to get the filter applied only in certain areas, such as the lower half over the lake, if you wish to not have the upper area changed at all. In this case though we wanted to create a misty, wintery, cold and foggy look to the whole view.





- New Auto adjust filter. Lets you interactively adjust contrast and white balance.


The new AutoBalance Filter in the Adjust... submenu

Dynamically change White balance or Exposure in realtime. Simply position the crosshair in the active pad area to move the hot zone in the picture.

Reduce the size of the hotzone to focus on fewer pixels. In this example over the bright area of the hair.

Reposition the hotzone over another area. In this example, over the carker background, to reveal the green grass.



- Reverse fields.
- Transform.




Click image for larger view
photographic filters
The timeline.
The timeline allows filters to be applied over the frames of an animation, even with changing parameters.

- New photographic filters and reverse fields have been added to the set of filters available in the timeline.
- Transform now works in world coordinates.
- Speed improvements.
- Bug fixes.


New menu layout:

- Everything at your finger tips. Just browse around.

- Buffer sizer is integrated. It supports layers and animation as well.


- Bug fix on the resize panel.


New panel for custom brush drop shadows.



Seamless Textures
- Real-time feedback on the seamless panel. You see the resulting seamless texture tiled immediately.


Scan frames
PD Pro can scan multiple images into an animation. This is great for traditional artists who have drawn their initial concept sketches on paper and need to scan them in all together into an animation.  The frames are scanned and resized to the size of the current buffer. A rotation can be added, such as 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise.
scan frames into an animation
Spline interpolation between mouse positions.
In previous releases, Dogwaffle would do straight line interpolation between the points recorded from your mouse or tablet. When doing straight or almost linear strokes that was fine but if you're drawing curved outlines with a fast hand you'd sometimes see line segments between the ported positions. A workaround was introduced with the free 2.1 patch by way of a separate drawing plugin called Penny.  The rendering engine of Penny uses Spline interpolation in addition to anti-aliasing and tablet pressure use, so your lines would always be as smooth as possible no matter how fast your hand.

Spline interpolation has now been added in the general rendering engine of PD Pro. It is an option in the Prefs menu (in the Display tab) which you can enable or disable at will.


Spline interpolation
In this example, the doodle drawn on the top part had spline mode enabled. The doodle below had it disabled, and you can see some line segmentation.
New starfield filter.
First it draws a subtle nebulous cloud on black background, using the plasma noise effect filter. Then it adds stars of various colors, distribution and sizes. It's a quick way to create a great starting point for space scenes, perhaps as a background for a composition with 3D spaceships or planets.




starfield fx
New Lightning effect in linear tool.

example of lightning You can find the Lightning effect tool in the Linear tool submenu.

Use two clicks to set a rubberband line's position and length across your current image. The lightning effect will then be drawn between these two points. Repeat at will to get more lightning branches added, or change the softness too.

Add other effects like Nova and lens flares.








The lightning tool, with varying softness increasing from left to right.
the lightning tool
Particle (optipustics) and Bristle Brushes

-
Much faster particles!
- Improved bristle brush tool on the optipus panel.
- tablet support for the bristle brush, including tilt (!)






... But wait, there's more:



Bug fixed to the animation system. Clicking on the stop button when an animation wasn't playing might have corrupted a frame.
 

Lots of features re-implemented. Check out the display
settings panel for example.

Store buffer has new combines modes and alpha support and faster
refresh. The store alpha feature also has faster refresh.

Copy/paste/replace buffers.

Transform alpha. Numeric alpha.

Reimplemented layered format (no backwards compatibility at this
point)

You can drag/drop files onto the buffer now, not just the background
form.

Path to Clipboard and explore features on the image browser.

Key grow and shrink now support animated brushes. They have menu items
now.



 Lots of new plugin interface features.

 The PaletteToWells feature has a cancel button now.



 The stroke recorder now supports all tablet information.

 There's a new wave displacement filter.

 Wave displacement on the timline can be animated.

 The sky renderer has been tweaked.

 Correct file extensions are now enforced.

 A bug has been fixed that caused file extensions to cause warning if  there was a "." in the filename.

 Loading a brush set now uses the default directory browser.

 The directory browser is exposed to the plugin interface. Resizing
 the buffer is exposed to the plugin interface, as is plasma, novas,
 and lens flares.

 There's a new plugin feature to initialize a Lut (lookup table) for
 mixing buffers with modes like add/sub/mult/div etc. They're the
 same modes used by penny.

 Subtractative mode is renamed Subtractive. The layer priority was improperly reversed.

 There are new menu items to select the current layers mode from the
 little icon on the top of the tool panel.

 You can now set a value for the tracing paper mode.

 There's now a 'utility' menu with items for things like the RYB
 mixer, etc.


There's a 'visible grid' option on the display settings panel.
 Rulers no longer flicker.
 menu items for light table, and the 'draw on black' option that was
 previously only a keyboard shortcut. With it you can draw with white
 on a black background and still use the light table.
 You can now select colors from the well with the tablets eraser. I
 don't think you could do that before.
 
 reimplemented but not really changed all that much:
 Optipustics loading and saving
 Media manager preview. Might be faster?
 internal to custom.
 layer merging.
 grids
 etc.