Project Dogwaffle & PD Pro Digital Painter...
What's new in v3.5?
| New lower Price: $29 - order now! |
Major New Features:
new Optipustics Features:
Image-based Forcefields for Particle brushes, plus new Styles
to generate Alpha on-the-fly along the particle traces!
Image-based Forcefields for Particle brushes, plus new Styles
to generate Alpha on-the-fly along the particle traces!
Version 3.5 was introduced October 6,. 2005 - it replaces prior version of 3.x - as a free update it is available to users of prior 3.x versions such as v3.0 (upgraded from 2.x), v3.1, v3.1a or v3.2. Users of v2 will find an upgrade path from v2 to v3 in the sales area and will then be able to apply the 3.5 update patch.
Tutorials: new tutorials which use v3.5 features can be found here. Others are in the general tutorial area.
So, what's new in version 3.5 of PD Pro?
There is a short answer, and there there is a long answer: Details below.
dragon head by Martin Duerr, Cybersign.de
from Digital Photo Darling to
Little Monster in just a few seconds! >
- MMX support added for even more real-time effects,
- Bug fixes (yes, so there were a few)
- more helpful tooltips.
- Improved animation
capabilities.
- Work with separate color channels.
- Many new filters, and existing
filters updated with new options.
- Internal support for the 3rd party Lua
scripting language with a number of scripts already available that add
a lot of previously unavailable possibilities.
- A programmable and
scriptable GUI (Gui Server)
- Improved tools for performing pulldowns and timing conversions.
- Improvements to the already powerful particle system, including sizeable particles and the ability to draw into the alpha for compositing. Awesome for game developers creating foliage sprites with alpha masks, and great for making sophisticated animated brushes. "Force fields" is a great new tool for controlling the behavior of particles.
Erratic Fire
Particles under the Influence... of a force field
- Improved installer. Some resource files (particles,
patterns, media files) are in their own subfolders.
- Upsampling an image with layers crashed. fixed.
- Upsampling an image with bilinear-plus interpolation is faster.
- conversion of filter code base to MMX. Numerous filters are now benefitting from hardware acceleration available on the large majority of today's processors. The following filters are also faster: Swap channels, Roll channels, Invert, Transform, shift, twirl, sinoid, wet paint, posterize, rgb cube, combine premultiplied, Saturation, etc.
- Features such as linear alpha fader and flood fills and paint fills have also been tuned up.
- More filters are now modal since there was no extra functionality when they were non modal, and there was the possiblity of conflicts with other filters.
- Transform is internalized to avoid marshalling.
- Screen refresh, Layer mixing, and onion skin are tuned up for modern processors.
- Clearing a buffer is faster.
- The mechanics of adding a layer have been sped up. If you are experiencing long waits when adding layers, you are most likely having memory paging issues (going through virtual disk memory). Consider getting more RAM for those huge images you're working on. RAM is cheap. Anyway, for such an event, a busy pointer has been added.
- Jitter displace is now semi interactive and there are a couple of new displacement options.
- Color and Value panels open faster.
- The memory options panel can no longer get lost behind the prefs panel.
- The error message when there is an invalid path to the temp directory (if its volume is not available, for example) has been beefed up.
- Transformed custom brushes in matte mode are faster, and transforming in general is a little faster.
- The program would save out image sequences with either a period or comma separating the filename and extention, depending on localization. This has been fixed to always use a period.
- Animated brush sequences would not save correctly in some cases.
- The image browser now shows a statusbar. When you browse a folder
for the first time, it builds thumbnail icons of the image files found
in it. This can take a while in some cases, such as when you are
viewing a folder containing hundreds or thousands of images, if you are
on a slow machine, or if there are huge images that take vast amounts
of memory and need lots of time for internal rendering to an icon size.
The statusbar will be useful in determining if you still have time to
run to the coffeemaker for another cup before it's ready!
- The browser now defaults to showing all file types (instead
of the former 'Default Targa')
- Added a Channels plugin for working on rgb channels separately.
- Added a fast box filter.
- Added a little safety check for default window size.
- Faster adjust value and histogram panel.
- Faster layer mixing.
- Faster Shift (Filter>Transform>Shift...), now highly
interactive
- Improved the 'Old Film look' filter on the Timeline for more realism.
- Added some new retiming options making it easier to perform
pulldowns
and time conversions of animations. You can now use presets or
enter a set of
custom times to retime to and from. It is now basically possible
to convert
between any video format. see
a tutorial - new!
- Lua scripting: PD has gained support for the powerful Lua scripting language through a third party author who's developing DogLua. A Lua tab is now integrated in the Plugins panel and becomes visible if the Doglua plugin and Lua scripts are found to be installed (in the DogLuaScripts subfolder). Many lua scripts are already available. DogLua supports the Dogwaffle API, a scriptable GUI, alpha channel, Animation (access to its frames), RGB, HSV, YUV, and YIQ color spaces, and much more. see a tutorial - new!
- Lua is a powerful and fast scripting language. Doglua
adds support for the Dogwaffle api. It's based on a JIT (just in
time compiled) version of Lua 5.1 for super speed. Downloading
the new 3rd party lua scripting language and free DogLua addons brings
numerous new features. Sample scripts include:
- conversion between a number of color spaces
- Simulate the classic Amiga's HAM mode
- precise gGamma correction for stills and animation
- value-only contrast adjustment
- duotone and sunset filters
- Mirror, mirror frame, sharpen luminance and much more.
- Some free Lua scripts have surfaced which honour the good
old days of the Amiga: a HAM (Hold and Modify) mode simulation filter;
a MOD music player (ModDog) to listen to your favorite mod and med
music files for artistic inspiration while waffling.
- added menu items for 'set wallpaper' in the utilities menu.
Save your Dogwaffle artwork as your own desktop Wallpaper!
- Added new options for
Plasma tool, namely HSV and YUV
Plasma color. Creates great
new Plasma looks.
- Added 12bit_Halftone and 12bit_Random filters.
- Added brush key menu items for several brush_key plugins.
- Added 'Grime Blast' media to the media manager. Use it for
bullet holes or sunspots and much more.
- Added a programmable GUI server. The server is freely
distributable and can be used by any program that supports ActiveX. It
is for example used from within Lua scripts to make interactive user
interface components such as sliders, check boxes and color pickers to
name a few. A non-Dogwaffle
specific version is also available. The Gui server has already been
adopted by other imaging/paint programs and more are looking into using
it.
- Removed support for a couple of file types in the browser that weren't loadable in the main program. They tended to slow the browser down if present in the folder being browsed as it created unnecessary thumbnails.
- Added Dog_RestoreUndo to complement Dog_SaveUndo in the plugin interface.
- Store Buffer has a couple of new options like centered
restore and
scaled restore. This is useful if an image which was earlier stored is
being brought back into a buffer which has since changed size. see example
Using force fields on Particle
Brushes to paint realistic
'battered' grass and weeds
Weed, by Martin Duerr
Work on separate
color channels:
New types of Plasma noise:
(click image below)
Skull by Cybersign.de
larger version: 1600x1280
Introducing the Force-Field - "Use the
Force... field!"
- Particles can now be controlled by force fields created from images. The image used as the controlling forcefield can be the same or another image than what's actually being painted over. The Forcefield plugin alanyzes the image to determine color gradients and contours that will affect which way the particles can move. more details here and also see a tutorial - new!
- Particles can now be rendered to the alpha channel!
- Added "line
+
alpha"
Style on the optipustics panel. This is great for game developers
making content like lush and rich foliage textures that will be mapped
with transparency on simple rectangular polygons in their games.
- Added "Shrinking lines" Style - Particles can now be rendered with an initially fat, size-deminishing line. The initial (starting) size can be set with the Size slider.
- There's also a new style of "Shrinking lines +(alpha)" which also renders the alpha mask of the rendered particles
- Particles can now be tinted by the primary
color. The
'tint' color multiplies against the color coming from the gradient. If
the gradient is
greyscale (black to white, for example), you will see that current
color change brightness accordingly.
- Particles can use an overall fog color.
- Pressing shift while emmiting particles stops them from
emmiting, but
allows the simulation to continue as long as you're moving the
mouse.
This gives some fine-tuned control of how your particles do finish up
drawing.
using forcefields to
affect particles
using Line+Alpha to add
foliage in 3D or games
- Raw image support is improved.
A preview makes it
much simpler to see
what you're going to get.
- Alpha is supported for saving to raw format.
This new feature along with the above-mentioned MMX and other speed
optimizations makes it even more attractive to use PD Pro with
high-resolution digital cameras.
- Some new Photographic effects: A feature was added
to convert an image to greyscale as if
being exposed through a colored lens.
[see larger image]
- Fisheye now has a scale parameter.
- There's now also a Chroma
blur filter. The colors get blurred (washed out) without washing
out the luminosity.
- a new Brush Transparency
tool - to better fine-tune the transparency of custom brushes
- a new Brush Edge Feather tool
- updated raw and bmp support.
- Animation: Video-legalize for PAL and NTSC
- new dither options (12-bit)
