
Rendered in Puppy Ray:







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Introducing PD Howler 9.5,
powered by Project Dogwaffle
Erosion and Shadows and Clouds,... (oh my!) -
Realtime 3D Designer in Howler 9.5 - concept
art has gone purely ballistic!
What's New in
Howler 9.5 - See the Intro Videos | See more
tutorials
What's new in
Howler 9.5? Part 1 - General Overview
Can't
see it in your browser? Try the link on
YouTube: http://youtu.be/qSkgY6Cmyp4
What's new in
Howler 9.5? Part 2 -The Particle/Clouds Modeler
Can't
see it in your browser? Try the link on
YouTube: http://youtu.be/plT5LgltVj8
Pricing and
Availability:
Howler 9.5 is
a paid upgrade from 9.0-9.2 - Learn more here
If you have Howler 9.0-9.2, you can get a
discount of about 72% off the regular price.
Great discounts are available for upgrades from
earlier versions too, as well as sidegrading
from PD Artist. Even if you have a very old
version such as version 4 or 3.5 or before, contact
us to request a discount coupon for
upgrading to v9.5.
To order PD Howler, start
here.
What's New in 9.5?
Multi-Threading:
- Howler can now utilize up
to 64 processors or threads. It
previously had problems above around 12.
- You can now set an
arbitrary thread count for testing purposes.
Ambient
occlusion & Shading for foliage brushes
- Foliage now receives
shadows. (such as from itself, i.e. other
branches nearby, overlapping leaves, etc...)
- What you see is what you
get with foliage painting now. There is
no more preview phase followed by final phase.
- Foliage painting is now
much faster and uses multi-threading.
- There is no longer a
redraw phase. Everything such as depth
sorting is now done on-the-fly, as you
draw. Depth queue rendering is now a
simple pixel filter.
- There are new
presets for foliage brushes
3D
Designer
- The 3D designer tool now
uses a full floating point gamut, which makes
lighting more intuitive. Brighter
specular highlights are possible. Final
rendering is cleaner and smoother.
- Ambient
occlusion, shading and lighting in 3D
Designer.. Ambient occlusion
simulates shadows from nearby objects, and
within cracks and crevices. We're
experimenting with various modes such as
additive for snow caps, and slope dependency.
3D Designer also casts shadows from the first
light source. It can be soft shadows, and is
ultrafast, being on the GPU.
- Erosion: adds gullies to
sloped areas
- Better
Lighting through higher
dynamic range in lighting values. Specular
highlights look better.
- Sediments &
Sediment Coloring:
changes the terrain's elevation to make it
look like sediments deposited from erosion.
It's a bit like a delta forming at the bottom
end of a large river. But it's also showing
alongside a steep cliff. You can adjust its
elevation and slope. The optional coloring of
those sediment banks can add some nice
appearance of packs of snow in areas formed by
the sediments.
- Clouds
in 3D Designer: you can load one of several
presets of clouds. These clouds can then be
positioned, scaled and changed in brightness,
glow and self-shading. You can also create
your own clouds in the new Particle modeler,
save it, and then load it here in 3D Designer. The intent is to have bits of
clouds hanging around the valleys or mountain
peaks, appearing a bit like volumetric clouds.
- Realtime shadows,
software shadows, raytraced on GPU
- Snow,
Erosion and Raytraced shadows:
adding coloring based on height and slope, plus
erosion for eroded valleys and gullies, and
cast shadows, all contribute to a
greatly enriched look,
Exporting
the terrain mesh to Wavefront OBJ 3D format
- It is now possible to
Store a number of resources that 3D Designer
creates, such as the erosion map or texture
color map. The terrain mesh can also be
exported to a Wavefront OBJ file. This mesh
includes the effect of erosion as well as
sediments.
Gradient panel:
- You can now double click
the color entry arrowheads as a shortcut to
bring up the color selector panel.
Gradient list:
- fixed a bug that could
cause a crash.
Particle Modeler:
- Model the patchy shapes
of clouds, and render them.
- Animate and render the
clouds
- Save the clouds for use
in 3D Designer too
New
Adjustable Light Table
- the enhanced Onion
Skins: previously 2 frames before and after
the current rame. Now it shows 3 on each side,
and you can adjust their respective levels of
transparency. There's even a color coding
option to help distinguish the 'before'-frames
from the 'after'-frames. That's particularly
useful if the movement of the objects in the
frames is somewhat erratic and going back and
forth, such as a yoyo going down and up, or a
pendulum swinging left to right.
Local
contrast
- We're simulating
high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) by way local
contrast improvement. Instead of adjusting
dynamic range over the whole image, we do it
in small chunks. For some types of images,
this adds a whole new dimension of rich
colors. If you're a fan of bicycles, you'll
love this.
Click here
for more features info
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New!
Howler 2022
2021
2020
2019
Purely Ballistic:
v9.5 Slideshow
Puppy Ray!
v9 Slideshow

New Product!
Royalty-free music
Collection #1:
epic soundtracks
by Dan Ritchie
author of Project Dogwaffle

free samples:
More free samples here
and more available on
iTunes and CD Baby!
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