Hello again,
here is another update from the "Dogwaffler of the
Moment" newsletter.
See more and learn more in recent online editions
with HTML formatting, with images and links to
related videos. Start here to see all past
newsletters:
We sort of missed the
traditional mid-August back to school events. Now
we're smack in the middle of Labor Day
celebration. Let's have a sale! But let's
also not forget Pluto, Earth, and the other
wonders of nature worth documenting in your
paintings. Even if just imaginary.
Just a
reminder: we're still flying through Space
way out there, getting farther and farther
away by the second, and yet still
transmitting tons of new data that was
hastily recorded during the July fly-by....
be sure to keep looking for new discoveries,
new letters from Pluto.
Even more
exciting is that announcement the other day,
confirming that water still can be found in
some areas and during some times of the year
on Mars! Very salty water, mixed with brine,
but water nonetheless, melting in late
Spring/Summer and disappearing, freezing or
evaporating by Martian Fall. Notrmally, water
freezes at 0 centigrade and on Mars evaporates
around 15 degrees Celcius, but thanks to the
salty mixture from brine it lowers the
freezing point to around minus 70 and even
slightly raises it to 24 degrees before it
evaporates. Nippy! That's luke-warm enough to
enjoy bathing on the slopes of Olympus Mons.
And it will carry you just as if at the shores
of the Dead Sea or Salton Sea.
Yes, it's water, liquid, and then some.
Lots of imagination unleashed around the sandy
red planet that needs to be captured in
Dogwaffle paintings and renderings. Stay
tuned, if not duned.
More Tutorials
Here are a few recent new
tutorials:
Keep looking, we have a few new ones for PD
Particles and beyond.
We're continuing to
make advances with our development underway for
the upcoming v10. If you are not on Howler 9.6 yet
please upgrade soon, as there will be great
incentives to upgrade to v10 at big discount.
We just had an internal build 52, for what will
eventually be released as v10, still looking to be
around late 2015/early 2016. Let's hope the flu
season cooperates. Our dear programmer just went
through the experience of being an early adopter
of "hey buddy can you manufacture some anti bodies
the old fashioned way? like, you earn it!". So
with any luck, he's all set for the rest of the
flu season, barring some silly mutations, coming
from Mars no doubt.
'nuf said, so here's area 52 update:
The big change in this build is that undos are
completely re-written. Undoes are now object
oriented and are more self aware of how they are
created. They now support RLE compression. In the
future they may support saving to disc.
Initialization of undos are now separated from
image initialization, so in the future it may be
possible to undo size changes.
Thanks to the compression for undo images, Undos
now use less memory, making more free for
animations. 20% or better should be common.
Undos now have more precise options in program
settings. You can now have a minimum and maximum
number of undos as well as a memory target. The
best of both worlds.
Unrelated to compression, animation and layer
operations using the temp folder should be 25%
more memory efficient and measurably faster.
sizing, rotating, cropping of animations and
layers should all be affected, as well as the
motion prediction module. Wait,...that was already
lightning fast, did we just break the speed of
light?
Howler now boots (launches) to just around 40 megs
of RAM (depending on default image size) compared
to 200 megs before, and will use more as needed
for undos rather than pre-allocating it all
upfront. Compression should still help keep it
lower than previous versions.
Layers thumbnail is now remembered.
Under photographic filters, there is a new filter
to simulate the look of 2-color film processes
from the 20's-40's and into the 50's. These
processes were used by early technicolor and other
processes. So in essence, while we're moving in
the future, we're also letting you experience the
past... but seriously: They usually represented
color using red-orange and blue-green died
negatives, sometimes on both sides of the film, or
sometimes 2 pieces of film glued together. The
results were a "pretty good" representation of the
color spectrum with good flesh tones and reds, and
some blue greens and mild yellows. Greens were
often subdued or missing. (it looks all very real
for us in SoCal, no water = no green)... Another
example is the early 1920 color Ben Hur, which
represented reds and greens brilliantly, but had
poor flesh tones. Not so good for spaghetti
carbonara. But ok for Linguini al pesto! Mangia.
What can I say, I'm a dog, I love waffles, I like
pasta too,... I could eat this stuff up all day
long.
what else?
numerous bug fixes.
To summarize:
In the past, undo memory was calculated by a
desired amount of memory to use. We did this
to optimize usage between undos and
animations. But it was inflexible for users
who worked on very large images, who only got one
or two undos to work with.
The new undo system uses compression for better
memory handling, but it is also more
flexible. In addition to a desired memory
target, there are now minimum and maximum clamps
for undos. This way, when working with very
large images, you still get a good number of
undos, and when working with very small images,
you don't get way too many undos.
Here's a sneak peek at the controls for the new
undo:
A while earlier we reported adding animated
brushes to the raytracer, PuppyRay, at least the
GPU-powered version. Expect some snazy underwater
scenes where we take a peek at the water surface
above and see ripples and lights animating, skies
animated, not static. Nice!
The end of
the Delirium - PD Particles Sale ends in a day
or two
We've
had PD Particles version 9 (aka Particle9)
on sale for a few weeks. At just $3.50, this was
a promo with SharewareonSale.com - see here for
other promotions to come or take advantage of
this one while it still lasts a day or so.
Here are some new pieces
created in PD Howler, PD Artist and/or PD
Particles. We hope it inspires! Click the
images for full sized versions. Feel fre to use
some of these as starting images from which to add
more of your own clouds and trees, grass and foggy
visions.
Find more here : in the Updated Slideshow of PD
Howler:
And that's it for now. Thanks for waffling
and howling!
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