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Artist Bio:

Pierre is a product and packaging designer for a party goods manufacturer in Westchester County, NY.  His background is in traditional 2D animation and has worked in the animation industry throughout the 1990's and early 2000's.

Pierre's first introduction to computer art started in the late 1980's with his trusty Amiga computer and a copy of DeluxePaint III.  One of the reasons he loves PDPro so much is that it has a lot of the same paint and animation functionality that DeluxePaint had, such as the use of animated brushes and a virtual light box and onion skin effect.

Pierre now splits his time between his home life, work, and his hobbies of composing music, creating illustrations and animations, and paper model designs.

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Hi everyone!

My name is Pierre Fontaine and I've been using Project Dogwaffle and PD Pro since about 2006. In truth, I used it quite a lot in the early days but found some of the features frustrating so I left it aside for awhile and moved onto other programs. However, when v5 came out, I started to get interested again, especially as the new animation features like frame painting started appearing in v5.1.
 

If anyone's interested in my work (with and without PD Pro), please take a look at my blog:


I also have a more formal online portfolio located here:


I'd like to share a few experiments I've done here:


Hamster run cycle:

This animation started as a simple "bouncing ball" that I picked up as an animated brush then repositioned and offset by a couple of frames so that each of three ball shapes were bouncing slightly behind the others.  These would become the basis of the hamster's run cycle; the right most ball would form the basis of the head, the next one to the left would be for fore-body and the last one would be the back-body.  This allowed me to then fill out the body and work on the position of the limbs to get the run cycle completed.


Creating this kind of run cycle would have been much more difficult to do without the use of animated brushes.


Dancing In Hell

This animation was created with a limited number of frames drawn loosely within PD Pro.  I then sequenced the frames using Frame Painter.  I then composited the animation onto a background using the Timeline function, added some effects like tinting the animation so that it appeared mostly red and then added a wave distort so that the whole thing looked like fire and kind of hellish.



Orbicles Landscape

This landscape was created using just the new Orbicles painting tool.  Much to my surprise, I found I could get some very subtle effects as the particles moved around and mixed in with the pixels already on the screen when used at very small sizes.



More Landscape Experiments


Both of these tree paintings were done to play with various PD Pro painting tools and see what kind of effects I could get. 



I was impressed that I could create very natural water-color effects as well as heavy oil paint effects.




Fantasy Landscape


This image was created in a few minutes using PDPRo's built in 3D transformation tool and lens flares.  First I used some Perlin noise as the basis for the 3D displacement map.  I then took advantage of the lighting features within the 3D transformation tool to dramatically side light the cones with red and blue light.  Lens flares and some other effects finished the effect.




I also work with a variety of 3D tools. Below are some examples:

Curvy and Carrara Illustration #1

I used Curvy 3D to quickly create and texture a dragon's head.  I then exported the model as an .OBJ file into Carrara, where I placed the retextured model into one the program's built-in landscapes to create the final image.


Curvy and Carrara Illustration #2

The model for these giant walking war machines was very quickly created and textured in Curvy 3D.  I repositioned the model a number of times to get the various ships then saved the images for later use.  I then rendered a landspace in Carrara.  Finally, I composited all the elements in Photoshop where I added glows, laser beams and shadows to tie all the elements in together.

These kinds of images are perhaps my favorite to create as I love the idea of taking a lot of elements and bringing them together to create something totally new and unexpected.



Another spaceship below:

The basic model and even its texturing(!) were done in Curvy 3D.  This model started as a very basic lathed model but the displacement image really gave it some very cool detail.

I exported the Curvy model as an .obj file and brought it into Carrara 6 Pro to light and render it. I also added a bump map to accentuate the details and give the ship a greater sense of scale.

After I rendered the model, I used Photoshop to add the background, lens flares and engine exhaust.  From beginning to end, this image took between 2-3 hours.