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Welcome!
Howler 2023 is not available here yet but it's coming soon and you can already pre-order early beta releases to get in on it now.
Order from the developer directly, at https://pdhowler.com/Cart.htm
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.
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 brushes even respond to sounds.
- 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.
- We now use AVX for some of the operations. It makes things much faster. But if you have a really old PC, this may not work for you. Try the demo first, once available.
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 2023
New Sky Filter >>> click here for more info on the new sky filter, including sample animations
Screenshots
Below are some of the new features coming to PD Howler 2022:
Reminder: What was new in the prior releases?
This is Howler 2023 (version 16) | Howler 2022(v15) | 2021(v14) | 2020(v13) | 2019(v12) | v11 | v10 |
Captain's Log - The Latest Developments, the News:
What's New in PD Howler 2023?
Here are various bits and pieces of interesting developments, new features, improvements, bug fixes,... related to Howler 2023.
We call it the Captain's Log:
====================================================================================
It took a while but we're now able to make new builds of the software.
Here are some recent builds:
Most Recent update:
May 21 2022
- Added the option to select the background color to clear to when creating an animation from the Anim/create panel.
May 20 2022
- Made some final tweaks to the new media history browsing experience
- rewritten Europa filter to generate cracked tectonic type surface textures
- The settings panel has a new layout to make it more readable on 1080p and higher screens since that is the default minimum size now.
May 16 2022
- Added an option to disable starting the program in full screen mode. The new mode will use whatever state the window was in when the program exitied.
May 12 2022
- The floating color picker now has a primary and secondary color button and flip button
- The ability to disable GPU support is now officially removed from the settings panel. This is due to how we are now developing code over the last few years. We are now developing directly on GPU, and so we do not have CPU fallback for any new features that are implemented on the GPU.
May 10 2022
- Added 1,2,3 point perspective guides to the guides panel.
May 7 2022
- Replaces the old sky render filter with a new cloud volume rendering filter
- The Mandelbrot filter has some new parameters to give more control over the final look of the render
- There are new keyboard shortcuts for navigation within the Mandelbrot filter
- Introducing the new sky volume rendering filter which replaces the legacy sky filter under the render menu.
- First look at the new Sky system (under development) - https://youtu.be/UQhHlkA-ir4
April 21 2022
A couple of notes at this point and moving into the future...
- 1) 2023 will be the first version to require Advanced Vector Extention (AVX) registers for some features in addition to SSE2.
- 2) As of 2023, the ability to turn off GPU acceleration is depricated 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 deprecated and removed in favor of a new and more comprehensive 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 was 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.
the Free Demo / Trial version of PD Howler 2023
Ready to try it for free? download and install this free demo version:
not available yet - Coming soon
Docs & Help - the Documentation - taking your first steps like a baby
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.
Simply Right-click the icon of the .exe 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)
(coming soon)
Testimonials
People are usually silent or very vocal ;-)
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 2023 in our Newsletters HERE
nothing here yet
