How to "use the Force":
1. change your name to Luke
2. click FF


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One of the strangest effects within
the particle brush system of Project Dogwaffle Professional (PD Pro)
has to be the use of force fields. First included with PD Pro 3.5, a forcefield
is defined by the currently loaded image in the main buffer. You simply
click "FF" in the particle
panel to activate the field, which is derived from the gradient in the
image. If you have high-contrast elemnts in the image, such as sharp
black lines on white, or other distinct 'features' in a photograph,
those will work wonders to affect the trajectory of your brush's
particles.
It may take a short second or two for PD Pro to calculate the
forcefield from the image's greyscale gradient, depending on how big
the image is. Soon, you'll see a control panel for the forcefield's
effect.
Once you have activated the forcefield, you can adjust how strong it
is, and which way it is affecting those particles you're about to paint
over it. You can let it follow the contrours (shapes), the color (Hue)
or the value (brightness) of the pixels found in the image.
Furthermore, you can clear the image buffer after the forcefield has
been activated, i.e. you can paint over something different, even a
plain white background, while the original forcefield remains in
effect. You could also open a new layer, and paint in the clear layer,
while seeing the underlying layered image as a visual reference of the
forcefield image, perhaps with diminished intensity, just as a hint and
soft visual guide. This is particularly useful when you want to paint
things that must appear to be 'tied' through the forcefield to the
underlying image. For example, when you want to add some mold and frost
or garland or other organic growing things along some of the visible
features, like grout on a tiled floor or in the corners of a poorly
ventilated bathroom, or the deep ridges on tree bark in a lush amazon
forest.
Finally, there are also some weird modes and just plain wacky effects
you can obtain, especially when further combining it with other
effects. For example, it can be fun to see what happens when you re-use
a created image as a new forcefield, almost in an iteratively recursive
way, again and again, and see where the force takes you.
So here we go, and let's remember the mission: just use the
force and have fun exploring the universe (of crazy shapes and colors)!
Here's a first step-by-step tutorial which assumes you already are
somewhat familiar with particle brushes, as well as using Shift-a to
redraw the most recent brush stroke. The examples below were created
just a single brush stroke, that was re-rendered a few times, mixed
with various changes in forcefield settings, brush settings, and
applying filters and such.
Step 1 - the basics
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