Humberto Abreu

Project Dogwaffle in Game Design:

Humberto 'Tico' Abreu, on:
Making Grass & Foliage textures

www.stormvisions.com

Hola, my full name is Humberto, though I usually go by Burt to spare the unaccustomed from needlessly tying their tongue in a knot. I currently live in Southern California with my wife and child.

-- Are you a student or professional?

I'm about 46 years old. I don't want to give students a bad name by claiming to be one. I'm more of a dabbler, with a bit of mad scientist thrown in for good measure. I am preparing to return to school to take some art and animation classes starting this September so I can say I hope to be a student.

I have a website at www.stormvisions.com - I'm into making games, using the 3D Gamestudio game engine.

It's important to create realistic textures with lots of foliage, grass, shrubbery, trees, etc. and I find the particle brushes (Optipustics) of Project Dogwaffle absolutely delightful to work with for this.

My experiments with Project Dogwaffle have mainly centered on using the particle brushes (Optipustics panel in PD Pro) in creating grass and plant like ground textures and 2D sprites of the same for use in Conitec's 3D Game Studio - another excellent product suite for game development.

See my collection of presets in the
Dogwaffle freebies section: particle brushes

-- how did you "discover" Project Dogwaffle?

Someone mentioned the free version of DW and as an ever impoverished student and artist wanabee I had to check it out.

I have since experimented with many more options and settings of the Demo version from the newer 3.2 release (PD Pro) and keep getting great results with new stuff I'm experimenting with.

Here's my tall grass setting.

-- how long have you been waffling?

I haven't been waffling long if you count actual time spent with the program, however I have been 'aware' of the program for several years and keep coming back to play with it. PD Pro looks great and since I hope to get serious about art with some personal projects I plan on getting a copy this month.

Here's a small collection of several variants of grass.

Carpet Flowers are great to plaster a whole
ground with these tufts of islands.

I've always needed areas filled with moss.
There's an experiment with settings for moss.

-- do you consider yourself an 'artist' at heart, like, do you paint, sketch, go to the Art museum etc?

I grew up as the child of immigrant parents who thought art wasn't 'real work' and so I've ambled around from real job to real job. I am a creative at heart and think I have raw talent. Over the years I've picked at clay, puppet building, writing, drawing, paper mache, wood carving, ceramics, digital art and similar projects and always surprise people with what I can do as a first time effort. What I've lacked is the discipline to really sit down and learn. I hope that I can do so now and move into some sort of creative career.

-- do you use 3D modeling/animation products?

I have played with Carrara, Amapi, 3DS Max and several free modelers but have no great proficiency. I took a 3DS Max intro course which consisted of 3 weekends and these shots are from my student project. Would have loved to take more classes but these 'pro' clases cost $2000-$3000 each at the time.

-- what is your main profession ?

I currently work in an office pushing paper and that's a big part of why I want to get serious about art. I worked in retail management and owned a web business for many years prior to this.

At home I use a Dell, Windows XP, Pentium 4 at 2Ghz(?), it's about 18 months old

click to enlarge >>>

Additional updates and presets here at my place:
http://stormvisions.com/pages/art-design/dogwaffle.php

But having a cool product isn't enough, you need a friendly and active community. DogWaffle has this and it is a big selling point for me.

-- what do you like most about Dogwaffle?

I love the Optipustics particle brushes feature. I can see using it in my game art experiments. There are also many other features I intend to explore as soon as I get PD Pro. I also love the idea that you can design your own plugins; even if I can't address that myself right now it increases the value of the product and opens the possibility of not only expanding certain features but integrating with other tools.

-- what needs improvement?

Personally I've always tripped on the concept of the various buffers. I have an attention deficit disorder and some memory problems so I tend to use tools intuitively. For me this means that until the concept really 'clicks' for me, so I don't have to think about it anymore, I'll be stumbling around before being able to do the advanced stuff.

-- do you use other 2D imaging or painting tools?

PSP, though I use mostly the basic features (not the script writing for example), I also very recently picked up TextureMaker. I've played with the DarkSim procedural texture generator demo a lot as well but the price is too far out there for me to get it. I've got a folder full of freeware tidbits that once in a while I use to generate a pattern or texture which I usually take into PSP and may use as a brush or a layer in a more complex image. I've played with several 3D apps but need to take classes because of the medical issues I mentioned, very detailed and complex stuff is hard for me to teach myself. I need to actually see it being done to grasp it.

Oh and I have LostMarble's Moho which is, like DogWaffle, an incredible, unique and spectacular product. I purchased Moho a few months ago and love it.

[editor's comment: so true! We too love Moho!]

Here's a texture I created last year with the
Demo version of Dogwaffle 2: