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Welcome!
Howler 2022 is now available - here you can see the details about each or most of the new, recent builds below.
We will also have a cheaper 'Artist' edition. If you don't see it yet, it means we haven't built / released it yet. We make PD Howler first. PD Artist then occasionally is released too, as a subset of Howler. Artist is cheaper, but don't get me wrong: PD Howler is very affordably priced already too, considering all that it offers. But there are a few things you might never use, nor want to pay for. If you don't do animation or multi-frame rendering, if you won't ever work with video - check PD Artist.
Not sure which one to pick? Compare the two: PD Howler vs. PD Artist - what's the difference?
What kinds of animation can Howler do?
- frame-by-frame (you draw them)
- assisted frame-by-trame (with shortcuts courtesy of the Frame painter and similar tools)
- brush keyframer
- animation of a number of parameters in a 3D landscape rendering (camera, Sun, terrain, lighting,...)
Here's an example:
Reminder:
Project Dogwaffle (PD) is first and foremost a digital painting program. But it also does much more.
Never heard of Project Dogwaffle? or PD Artist or PD Howler, PD Particles??
- PD Howler is a digital paint program; it alredy comes with many(!) brushes, and tools to create your own, import more brushes, including particle brushes for foliage. Some brushes respond to tablet pressure. Some even respond to sounds. Yes, you can play Wagner's Valkyrie, sing long with Alan Walker, listen to the intensity of a violin in the hands of Esther Abrami, or whatever inspires you musically, and see how it affects your very own visual art :-)
- Howler is awesome for nature painting. Some brushes react to pressure when you have a digital pen (such as Wacom tablet). Other brushes react to the volume of music(!). Or to the speed of your hand. The angle of the brush stroke and pen. Some also will react to "behind the scene" alternate images (Swap buffer holds a greyscale gradient image, used to affect the size of the brush). There are tools for 3D content going into the brush too. And animated brushes.
- Howler does animation too. You can work with video. You can paint with video on stills or on video
- There are many Filters, applying on still images and across videos, keyframed, special effects, composing with other images, compositing (blue, green, magenta, magic pink and other screens), etc...
- Realistic 3D landscape rendering
- video and animation post-FX: Motion estimated interpolation, Rotoscoping and chroma keying, compositing and lots more. If you work with video clips, this will be a great tool as a companion to your video editing solution.
- PD Artist, the little sister to Howler, doesn't do animations (except for animbrushes) - but it's equally great for painting.
- PD Howler has a bunch more filters, meant for animation but of course also applicable for single-frame use. You can render the filter into a few frames or many and then pick the best from it, if you still only want a still image.
What's (arguably) not so good? (there's always one or two achilles heels, right?)
- Layers: we do have layers, but... not quite the same, they're with RGB channels only. No specific alpha channel per each layer. So, layers do exist but they are not auto-opaque except if you set them up with color-keying (chromakeying) such as green screen, blue screen, magenta or magic pink. That part we do very well, mind you.
- Layers are mostly there to blend images, not to hide them from eachother. But you can still use them also for collage, assembly, layout and for example to design a business card with a layer of black ink over a layer of painted or rendered graphics.
- Side-by-side non-overlapping? No problem.
- You also find some brush types that render their selection mask into the alpha so if you want to paint assets with transparent backgrounds, it works well for this, such as for creating grass, foliage, bushes,...
- Plus there are several paint 'modes' and one is with extra post-FX. One of the post-FX is to draw on RGBA. So you can have those pixels selected as you draw. Then save it with the resulting mask. It's not perfect, but for many use cases it works.
- It's a 32-bit program. But we're doing ok, compressing things, and it runs best and super-fast on a 64-bit version of Windows with lots of RAM. We recommend at least(!) 4 GB, preferably 8-16 GB. Some modules may store information in their own address space. So while a single instance of Dogwaffle can only work in a 32-bit address-space, collectively you may work on much bigger. We also use the disk space for temporary storage, undo image stacks, etc...
All in all, Howler is howling fast. Heavily optimized and designed on low end systems, due mostly to starving-artist budget realities, you'll likely find that runs very smoothly on your desktop or laptop Windows PC too. This software does not require high-end gaming systems, though it's nice to have a dream machine:
- Graphics card: If you have a GPU with many Cuda cores or threads, great! We render some 3D on GPU
- Main processor: If you have a CPU with many cores, such as 8, 12, or even 16 CPU cores, plus hyper-threaded to doubling up to 32-64 logical cores on Intel or similarly on AMD threads, you're in heaven. A bunch of our tools are multi-threaded, go for it.
- Disk: if you have an SSD or similarly super-fast hard drive, great. You may not even notice the delay in saving a long animation, between saving to disk vs. saving to memory, almost the same.
More about features here and here: the Dogwaffle Main Features List
Howler vs. Artist - what are the Differences?
Images that were created (rendered and/or painted) with PD Howler 2022
Need more examples? A mix of painted and rendered creations from many places:
- Slideshow - wow! - with music
- Dogwafflers of the moment - Artists showing their artwork and talking about why they use Dogwaffle
- Newsletter - some of these publications also present artwork from newly discovered artists
More images coming soon... stay tuned.
Media Browser, Brushes, Paint tools...
Creating and rendering 3D landscapes from elevation maps (PLUS: animation)
Click here - View the animated version of the sunrise in our YouTube pdhowler channel
Howler is a paint program
- you can see many more examples in earlier releases and the WOW slideshow
Below are some of the new features coming to PD Howler 2022:
Reminder: What was new in the prior releases?
This is Howler 2022 (v15) | Howler 2021(v14) | Howler 2020(v13) | 2019(v12) | v11 | v10 |
A significant milestone with 3D Designer: v9.5 (and the first on Steam -- v9.6)
Captain's Log - The Latest Developments, the News:
What's New in PD Howler 2022? (much of which also applies to PD Artist 2022)
Here are various bits and pieces of interesting developments, new features, improvements, bug fixes,... related to Howler 2022.
We call it the captain's log:
====================================================================================
It's been quiet for a while, as we had a few events and other projects.
If you like to read, look for Dan's latest stories at pdhowler.com, Silver Squirrel and more. Specifically: http://www.pdhowler.com/Download.htm
there you'll see information on such things as Trial downloads, as well as the stories, by joining as a sponsor on Patreon. Become a Patron.
Or straight over here for all books from Silver Squirrel to the newest, Infernotopia: A Wolf Story
http://www.pdhowler.com/Silver.htm
We also had a few of life's challenges, mishaps with broken equipment, stolen equipment, and more stolen equipment, but also helping hands with replacing broken equipment. It's been gratifying and encouraging to see the support.
A big thank you and shoutout to ParticleFX! More on this later.
It took a while but we're now able to make new builds of the software.
Here are some recent builds:
Most Recent update:
Note: most recent updates shown here are pre-release development for Howler 2023.
The final release for Howler 2022 was build 48
April 21 2022
A couple of notes at this point and moving into the future...
1) Howler 2023 will be the first version to require Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) registers for some features in addition to SSE2.
2) As of Howler 2023, the ability to turn off GPU acceleration is deprecated and will be removed in a future version.
- As of this build, the Mandelbrot filter has a new option for smooth gradients.
- Added Julia set exploration and animation filter.
April 13 2022
- Made some optimizations in Puppyray
April 5 2022
- Development continues, but is largely on API right now.
- We are moving our API into C++ so we can share the same code between CPU and GPU
- There is a small change on the brush timeline.
- The list now uses the Howler style vertical srollbar.
March 12th 2022 ...
- The file dropdown "favorites" list now refreshes much more cleanly
- some refinements to selecting your prefered accelerator in settings.
March 11th 2022 build 53
- There is now the option in the settings panel to choose the prefered default accelerator.
- These days, most computers have integrated graphics and often a descrete, high performance graphics chip. Originally, the system would choose a default accelerator based on having the most memory and not being connected to a display. But with time, that behavior changed to choosing the low-power solution to save batter life, but this was almost always the lower performance accelerator. So, now, Howler lets you choose whichever accelerator you want. The setting will take effect the next time the program is restarted.
March 9th 2022 build 52
- The dated Bumpy Toy filter under the render menu is now depricated and removed in favor of a new and more compreheensive Noise Tool filter.
- It features several layers of noise that can be displaced or compbined in various ways, and animated over a number of frames.
March 4th, 2022
- For the last several years, we've been replacing features, and especially filters, that seemed aged, outdated, or archaic, or if they could just be implemented more modern techniques or new features.
- For example, we replaced the entire convolve menu. Today, we are focussing on noise.
- Upgraded the Open Simplex noise filter with lacunarity and persistence parameters, and different noise types inluding rigid and turbulence, and the ability to animate. The filter gets promoted to the main Filter/Render menu.
- This has otheriwse been a month of R&D
- Added a new 4x4 matrix class to Howler
- Added a new vector and matrix, value and perlin noise classes that runs between both CPU and GPU using the same syntax to our internal api.
- Futhered our C++ framework for developing directly in C++. Historically we have cross developed between Howler and C++.
Feb 11th, 2022 - Note: this is the last and final build released for Howler 2022
Build 48
- There's a re-written floating color picker with new knobs to show you what color you currently have selected and manipulating the value/hue triangle now lets you slide outside of the triangle to get to your minimum/maximum value and hue easily.
Feb 6th, 2022
- There is a new option to create a paper texture on its own layer on the image size/creation panel. That way you have more control and uniformity over your paper texture and its functionality is not hidden from the user.
- Slight performance changes on new image creation.
Jan 31st, 2022
Build 47
- There is now a tone mapping setting on the light diffusion filter to adjust the bloom effect in add mode
- You can now break the tangent line in the warp mesh filter by holding down the shift key
Jan 29th, 2022
Build 46
- The Local Contrast filter is replaced with a more advanced, halo-free tone mapping tool.
- Fixed numeric input strangeness on the warp filter
Jan 27th, 2022
Build 44
- The texture limit mentioned in the last build had been fixed for the new warp mesh tool.
Jan 27th, 2022
Build 43
- Commited an initial build with the new warp mesh filter functioning. *Important, beta testers read on.
A fix for this will come in a future build.
- *For beta testers, please note that this build has an openGL texture limit of 1024x1024, so please DO NOT use this feature for your imortant work because it will be made blurry!!!
Jan 22, 2022
- Released PD Artist build 42
Jan 14th, 2022
Build ... (?)
- Added Centrepital and Chord Length curve types to the curve tool
- Added a new polygon class to the API
- Added some API support for cubic and coons spline patches
- Added some API support for quadratic and cubic splines
R&D: Work on Howler for the last several months has been primarily research and development. Hopefully we'll be seeing the fruit of that labor soon.
Oct 23th, 2021
Build 39
- Fixed crash if selecting a color from screen in the color picker.
Oct 14th, 2021
Build 38
After a 3 months (ish) pause in development, we have a new build. Here's what's new:
- Fixed bugs in the media drop-down menu that arose from changes to the Media panel in the last major build.
- Added "Copy to clipboard" and "Save as..." to the Stored Image dock.
- You can now right-click on a stored image to bring up the same context menu. This is much faster when you're on a high-resolution screen and find it time-consuming to aim on the right place in the interface.
- T
he AA (antialiased algorithmic) pen now can use the various drawing modes, including clone and rubthrough to name a few. Those are no longer ghosted out in the "modes" drop-down menu. This includes the "Rub-through" mode which transfers pixels from the Swap image to the Main image as you do your brush strokes in that mode, effectively blending pixels from the two images just where you 'paint'... We just saw this mentioned in a recent video too, which was done before this most recent change. So in the past, as shown in that video, you'd have to switch to a custom brush explicitly. Now it does it automagically for you. It works by converting the AA-pen to a custom brush when those modes are selected.
==============
July 12th, 2021
Build... ??
- Brush keying now has the option to key an entire animated brush
- the Brush Store feature now has the option to clear every frame uneffected by the alpha to the current primary color (this can be useful because building animated brushes with the store feature can create transparent areas that have underlying areas of different colors, and re-keying them will cause unexpected problems)
==============
July 8th, 2021
Build... 0033, AKA Howler 2022.1 - here's an intro video on our youtube channel
- Completed changes to the Media Manager, including performance improvements, new icons, and others
- The Most Recent Media list on the Media Manager is now remembered between instances
==============
July 6th, 2021
Build...
- We are retiring the Cartoony and Gouache folders from media.
- Gouache is basically an opaque watercolor, so those media have been moved there.
==============
July 3rd, 2021
Build... 0031
- Commiting changes to the media browser including speed improvements to loading media previews and window sizing
- Media are now grouped inside of rectangles to make it simpler to tell what splat goes with what brush preview, and so on. Check this video on youtube
- The folder list now using the Howler style scrollbar instead of the system scrollbar.
==============
July 2nd, 2021
Build... 0030
- Mipmap generation is much faster now, which facilites some performnce improvements in the media selector and brush shapes panel.
==============
June 26th, 2021
Build... 0030
- Changing the brush shape no longer resets the step size or brush style
==============
June 25th, 2021
Build... 0029
- Added ability to save brush shape using either the current brush image or it's alpha
==============
June 25th, 2021
Build... 0028
- It is now possible to show all brush sets on the brush shapes panel at the same time
- Save and Delete new shapes directly
==============
June 10th, 2021
Build...
- Addressed some perceived performance problems and visual glitches on the brush shapes panel.
==============
June 8th, 2021
build ...
- Posting new build of Howler Demo - try it for free!
- It is now possible to escape out of picking a screen color from the color picker with the new turkey icon via the esc key.
- The same feature now works across all monitors.
==============
May 25th, 2021
build 22
- Somewhat cleaner scrolling/sizing of the layer sidebar panel
- Trying to eliminate the flash that sometimes manifests in the stored image dock
==============
May 17th, 2021
build ...
- It's now possible to save a color swatch directly from the swatch aranger
==============
May 3rd, 2021
build 17
- retired the old/orignal noise removal tool in favor of the newer tools.
- Smoother scrolling in the lens flare panel
- It was somewhat annoying that restoring an image from the dock would turn on the alpha selection when there was nothing stored in the alpha. Fixed
- The woodgrain filter now has a frequency setting
==============
Apr 30th, 2021
build 15
- Anylitical Upscale Super-resolution is now feature complete
- Eliminated the chromatic aberration in the uprezing
==============
Apr 29th, 2021
build ...
- Added an api class to allow GDIplus drawing directly into a memory buffer.
==============
Apr 28th, 2021
build 14
- The stats tab on the non-local filter is now implemented
- It is now possible to filter out bad matches if you find here are a lot of poor matches
- The non-local filter is now complete
==============
Mar Apr 27th, 2021
build 12
- Fixed a bug in the levels filter that caused the histogram to display incorrectly
- 4x mode is now enabled on the superresolution feature
==============
Apr 26th, 2021
build ...
- The dead area on the titlebar that was unclickable has been fixed. This area overlapped the statusbar, which was often hidden. It now works more properly, but this is a large change spanning API and plugin interface, so it needs further observation.
- The brush style dropdown menu now works consistantly with the mode menu. They both now work on mouse down.
- The menu on the stored image dock also now works this way
- Added a new stream writer class to the API
- Added new functionality to the VBimage API class which is a general pourpose class for working with imagery internally
- Going to call this one an internal victor
==============
Apr 24th, 2021
build ...
- The r,g,b,h,s,v labels in the color picker are now editable
- You can now enter hex "web" color notation on the color picker
- fixed a bug in the hex color picker when picking colors in certain green ranges due to using integer math instead of long
- further progress on Anylitical Upscaling. Now uses a patch based approach
==============
Mar Apr 21th, 2021
build ...
- The convolution kernel filter has a new transpose option
==============
Mar Apr 20th, 2021
build ...
- There is a new filter/combine by swap filter to calculate the euclidean distance between the pixels of the two images
- Added a small script to swap the red and green channels
==============
Mar Apr 20th, 2021
build 2022-007
- The color picker now has an option to pick any screen color, including from the GUI and other program that are visible, and the desktop.
==============
Mar Apr 19th, 2021
build 2022-006
- Finishing up non local means. It's pretty much textbook at this point.
- Added Filter/Combine/Signed subtract
- Creating a new document from the dock, Menu item has moved near to the top of the menus on the dock.
==============
Mar Apr 18th, 2021
build 2022-003
- Added Filter/Noise/Non Local Means noise removal
==============
Apr 12th, 2021
build beta 002
- Added Filter/Adjust/Adaptive Threshold filter
==============
Apr 9th, 2021
build beta 001
- There is now an option to feather the alpha channel.
- There is now a Distance Transform filter under the filter/stylize menu
==============
Mar 28th, 2021
build beta 000
- Stored images now have the option to be marked as Indelible, meaning they will survive a program restart. Closing them or closing the entire stored image dock will render them fully delible again, or you can uncheck the option.
- Images in the dock that survive a program crash are now automatically marked as indelible.
Late May 2021: This marks the start of a new development cycle. Features in the previous build (such as multiple frequencies CLAHE) may or may not be rolled into this, or released later.
Welcome to the birth of Howler 2022. With any luck we might release it in July 2021
If you're struggling with your discretionary spending budget and Howler 2022 is out of range, why not consider Howler 2021 to start with that, and consider upgrading to Howler 2022 later?
the Free Demo / Trial version of PD Howler 2022
Ready to try it for free? download and install this free demo version:
download and run to install: Howler_2022_0025_Demo.exe
Size: 128,062,400 bytes (122 MB)
CRC32: 2BDB51BD
CRC64: D339A5C613836240
SHA256: B0B7AD4B30E6CEA96CECE5EB9503BD8C597FD1CFD2B5E65748F75F11E833BDB9
SHA1: 364956BF1FE58BD7A57DBD6038D29856D58AF1CD
BLAKE2sp: 7075E3255BDEC73715278D8A265E98B2AB07E122447EE0962360D8D81406955E
Docs & Help - the Documentation - taking your first steps like a baby(dinosaur)
As a 1-man show, resources are a bit, shall we say, limited... there is not a tremendous amount of time available to do thorough documentation, keeping it updated with the many changes and new features, the user guides, reference manuals, etc... and we rely more on video tutorials on youtube.
But, there are also various guides, and with the help of some supporters we also are happy to show some translations. Here are English, French and Spanish documentation, and a few other options, to learn more about using Dogwaffle.
If you can write in German, Italian, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, ... any other language, please help spread the word and joys of waffling.
We have 1000+ free tutorial videos at youtube. (pdhowler channel and also the older staigerman channel).
We have a bunch of testimonials in the Dogwaffler of the moment (DOTM) and some with tutorials.
We still offer a tutorial CD for getting started with Dogwaffle. It is a bit old but will bring back memories and wjoys of discovery.
Start here:
https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/help
French:
https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/help/French
Spanish:
https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/help/Spanish
English:
https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/help/PDHelp
FAQ:
https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/faq
Tutorials:
https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/tuts
Latest versions - Checksums
Got it? downloaded it? Verify that your download is authentic and complete. Make sure it's legit and hasn't been tampered with.
- for PD Howler 2022:
Simply Right-click the icon of the program installer file, and find CRC SHA information to compare with these:
Below you see the expected checksums. If you see a different value on your copy of the file, your copy is corrupted or may have been tampered with. (perhaps containing a virus)
- released builds for Howler 2022:
Name: Howler_2022_0039.exe (build 39)
Size: 127448504 bytes (121 MiB)
CRC32: 24408F66
CRC64: F671B78414A7B76B
SHA256: B970A08DAE3E1F0E419CD8E29E0493DE42AF8EAFDB12AE786A5D6B4BCE64E85B
SHA1: 6AFA8D6425C261BE15A56DE4AAA456949215B4F7
BLAKE2sp: 74C36362E9EC9CD35268CA54430165C161B6A85D9F72898B5EFFB2601BE96188
Name: Howler_2022_1_0033.exe
Size: 127269419 bytes (121 MiB)
CRC32: 2D2923A1
CRC64: C27EF9299C5806A2
SHA256: A423A142192C8DE1108F89D105354C2A28BF964E3A04CC13023A778C1A460A8A
SHA1: 1E3BF14A9F6DB76453A3BD56D2E296F1F5F4272B
BLAKE2sp: 23E896A11DC1B9983B4310634131BC65EDF1119F75D6588977395C28614DF18C
Name: Howler_2022_0029.exe
Size: 128068361 bytes (122 MiB)
CRC32: 0A83A7A4
CRC64: 4ED842D183C60BDB
SHA256: 088D94D7BB4AF40AF8D740F451BBE34634A2987521424DBB1F4E924185278E77
SHA1: 99AAE3FF212E1507630EE1ACAD8C129DB9ABCF26
BLAKE2sp: BED09D554CB9FF56B247DB9DE80F2E0A0B0F30DA7FCE9F58BDB084C4B6725941
---------------------------------------------------------
- for PD Artist 2022:
[ COMING SOON - not yet available at this time ]
what is PD Artist?
---------------------------------------------------------
(Note: PD Artist gets released less frequently and has fewer features. If you want the best of the best (of the very best(!)), then get PD Howler.
Howler vs. Artist - what is the Difference?
Testimonials
People are usually silent or very noisy ;-)
See a few examples of what they do with PD Howler and even lesser versions of Dogwaffle or early PD Pro - https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/dotm - Dogwafflers of the Moment
Newsletters - the coverage of Howler 2022 in our Newsletters HERE
