The Dogwaffler of the Moment (DOTM) - our sporadic newsletter about PD Howler and PD Artist.

   August 2021 --- Analytical Supersampled Upscaling & Back to School & Labor Day




Other issues of the newsletter can be found here, often with more content:

https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/newsletter


This issue is located here:

https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/newsletter/178-August-2021-Labor-Day-Special


What's new in this newsletter?
Be safe, be healthy, be creative - and yes, do reach for the stars!



 





 
Howler development is on hold (we hope just temporarily)

 It's been a rough few weeks. There was some robbery/theft and there was a laptop that died, lost the motherboard. Replacement cost $900 or so. We don't have it.

Howler development is on hold, for now, hopefully not too much longer. We got a temporary replacement PC that will have to do, somehow. Thanks to a handful of caring artists-at-heart for helping. During the Olympics, it's nice to have friends that help carry the torch :-)


Also, if you feel inclined to support the mission, be it for the books (Silver Squirrel and more), or the software (Howler), here are two ways to support Dan:

GoFundMe
https://gofund.me/67a4dc59

Patreon

You can contribute small donations in support here:

https://www.patreon.com/user/posts?u=53690039
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Labor-Day and Back-to-School (-home-school?) Promotion

  Use this discount code for 40% off the regular price on either of these:



                Discount code good through September 15:  40SCHOOL21

- PD Howler 2022
- PD Howler 2021
- PD Artist 2021






Of course you still can request and use an even better discount coupon for 50% off for upgrading from any prior version, including sidegrades from PD Artist and non-Dogwaffle tools, 3D tools too. Make Howler the companion tool. Contact Philip at thebest3d.com/about for the discount code if you don't have one. Tell us which version you are using (or have used in the past).  Or also check Dan's direct website at pdhowler.com to see if there's similar or even better discounted deals waiting for you there.
And of course, one of the best ways to support the projects is by tell friends and family about Dogwaffle, also teachers in various types and grade-levels of schooling, especially if they have a computer lab with Windows PCs. Thank you for placing an order on here or at Daz3D or Steam or other platform. It may not be the latest greatest version in all places but it still will make a great companion to your arsenal of digital tools.

   



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New Dogwaffler of the Moment:  Mike Stone

This artist from the Chicago area has created cover art for music CDs for a few musicians and a bunch of other interesting artwork and has been featured on TV. Check his art gallery and learn more at PixelXaos.com

Start here:  https://www.thebest3d.com/dotm/





Mike also does animations and loops, using a variety of tools.

Here is a video we recently created to show how to repair some bad details or frames in a video.



How to fix a few more glitches on frames of a video animation, in several ways

https://youtu.be/fNxQsK2q7C4
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Geek Talk: Analytical Upscaling (aka Supersampling)
Analytical Upscaling or Supersampling is a tool that lets you upscale an image while maintaining the original 'sharpness' and adding new detail that appear crisper than if the image was simply resampled the traditional way.

It works without having to be on-online, i.e. we have implemented the code into Dogwaffle to run locally on your PC. If you have a PC with a nice high number of CPU cores, such as 8. 12. 16 or even (bless your heart) more, you will want to keep an eye the Task manager, showing each of the logical cores. You'll see them flare up to very busy ;-)  --- It's multithreaded. But it's not on GPU, and it uses block matching.  In this case Dan chose to use a C++ class to ease the block matching burden instead of working on hardware.  It's already a complicated problem.

It performs this image re-calculation by using the existing details found in the current image to construct a newer, higher resolution image. Imagine the image sliced into small squares, in similar analogous way to what you may remember from the motion estimation side (motion prediction module - see motion prediction mania! ). Each square is looking for details on shapes and colors, information across neighboring squares up to a set distance which you can control. The farther the distance, the more it thinks and looks for best solution, so the longer it will take to finish.

You can turn the image into double-size in this manner (x2), or even x4 (really 16x the original number of pixels, as it's doing a 4x4 resizing). Be mindful of the dimensions of the current picture, you might run out of memory quickly. This is more intended for small images needed at larger size, sich as when you crop out a small subset of an original image.

In the future there might be some extra safety steps to avoid running out of memory and crashing. For now, be careful. :-)

This works pretty well because of the fractal nature of images: Some smaller details resemble larger details in the same image.

Check the tutorial videos for more on this new feature (see below)

 
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Tutorials and Sample Videos

We had numerous new videos posted to our youtube channel. 


The Daily Dose
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3D27B6B09FEBDB03
  
 

analytical supersampling - part1   (aka upscaling with more details)

https://youtu.be/3IF85hd97u4





analytical supersampling - part2   (aka upscaling with more details)

https://youtu.be/IbX8Eav0I18



green screen compositing for still photography

https://youtu.be/a8Y_NPgT1o4

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Just One More -  

Long ago we were big fans of Carrara. Remember? We still are, mind you, but the program, Carrara, hasn't gotten much attention in recent years, it seems like the focus at Daz3D is on DAZ Studio. 

Still, Carrara has a great history, an evolution, was touched by Kai (as in Kai's power tools) for the novel interface, shared by Bryce, Poser, and Canoma.... the latter of which was acquired by Adobe. Perhaps we are starting to see any of this in Adobe's newer 3D developments?

Either way, this all prompted me to review my aging and old Carrar page at https://www.thebest3d.com/carrara

Yes we know, some of the links are old or broken, or in the words of our friend musician, old but not forgotten.

Check this section too:   Atomic City

https://thebest3d.com/carrara/atomicCity/index.html

We recently updated that page to replace all quicktime or Flash videos with mp4 versions. Remember the html5 revolution? It seems to far away now. But the impact it has had on multimedia, exceptional.


Carrara - It's still one of the coolest apps for learning 3D basics and in fact going beyond, far beyond just the very basics. You can see examples of animated face masks, green-screen compositing and motion tracking. Pretty neat.

Check in particular what was done about 20 years ago by Markus Rothkranz for Atomic City. And if you want to really be inspired, learn about Markus on his website, his present and his past, and how he started building sand castles in Germany as a kid. A dreamer with a vision and great talent.

I once visited him in his home in Vegas and it's the only time I can recall that was in the presence of 30-50 cameras, in his home based film studio.   This guy knows how to get busy.


Life goes on, the software struggles at times, some have gone or will disappear, others linger, new stuff appears. Blender seems to be getting bigger and bigger, with new version and features, even a 2D animation set of tools, Change is good, but let's also not forget where we came from. History is good too.  We also see the people disappear, in some of those videos, such as Debbie in some of those videos from Markus, where she reminds the alien robot where he parked his UFO,... . Such a great experience it was to have met her too on my own journey.



Speaking of which, we lost another great artist in recent weeks, Kathy Lee Berry. If you didn't know Kathy (also known as Kathie, and by her artist name Damsel):

https://www.heritagefhllc.com/obituaries/Kathy-Lee-Berry?obId=21997921

     


Some of her art can be found here:

https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/kathy-berry

If you have other samples seen online feel free to email us details. We're thinking about doing a DOTM page on her art, in memorandum. We know she used Dogwaffle on occasion too. It's been a rare priviledge to be in her thoughts, at the fingertips of her creativity. We miss her dearly. 






The Rose of Texas has faded. 

May her memory remain with us forever.  






As stated by Terry: She's in a better place now. Heaven has found a new angel!

 





Thanks again for waffling and howling!   Be safe, stay healthy, remain creative. 

Team Dogwaffle
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