#202 - Happy New Year, and Welcome to Material Properties!
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Hello again!
There have been just a few updates to Howler but some of it may prove significant to your workflow. Hope you like it.
The latest build as of this writing January 1st is build #87 for PD Howler 2024.
We had double-loading added back in November, and then a few more things in recent days:
https://www.thebest3d.com/2024/index.html#news
Half-tone Painting (new FX brush setting)
This was added in early/mid December. It's a new FX option in Brush settings. Currently applies to brush strokes in paint tool with custom brushes, and with the Linear tool for straight lines.
Here you will find a brief intro tutorial on the halftone painting FX:
https://www.thebest3d.com/2024/tutorials/index.html
Interesting effects creates with halftone brush FX, then using the result as elevation map:
The big one:
Material Properties in Geometry Viewer
You may have seen some recent tutorials where we tinker with some of the PBR settings to alter the appearance on 3D rendering, such as for giving it more metallic appearance, reflecting the spherical environment map, or giving it more roughness, dispersing that reflection.
Now we have a GUI for that, or at least some of that. You will find a new option in the geometry renderer, that opens a material properties interface.
You can only access it after you've loaded an OBJ object. So, try for example with one of the items in the tTest collection, such as the little dragon. Also be sure to enable one eof the environments, such as one with dirt-brown colors at bottom and blue-sky colors above
Then you can access the Material Properties:
The materials found in the .mtl files will be list to the left. They don't currently show their names, just Material 1, Material 2 etc... if there are more.
Note that it may change the appearance of the current render if you click the Material. Some of the items on the right size seem to be reset. Might be a bug, we'll see.
You can then make changes to the various items shown:
- Diffuse color: click
the colored box to change the diffuse color.
- Emmisive color: click the colored box to change the emissive color
- Roughness: keep it low if you want to see the environment reflected. Try 0.1
- Metallic: keep it high if you have selected an environment map and want to see it reflecting on the surface. Try 0.8 - 0.9 or even 1.0
- Clearcoat and Clearcoat gloss: It is sensitive to a small gloss. Keep gloss around 0.05-0.15 and then adjust the Clearcoat amount to your liking.
- Bump: this works if you
have a bump map enabled on the surface. It won't show a
difference if there's no bump map.
Here are a few renditions
of the same little dragon:
More is needed to make this a really complete solution, but we hope this can already help you in your visual explorations.
Time to upgrade to v17 - Howler 2024 ?
If you haven't upgraded to Howler 2024 yet, use your discount coupon for 50% off the regular price, or if you order before January 8, get it even cheaper: to ring in the new year, we're offering PD Howler 2024 at just $24 for a limited time, for the first week of January. No discount code needed, this discount is automagic when you order here:
https://www.thebest3d.com/sales
If you catch it early enough it might even still be at the $19 year-end special promo.
Happy New Year, and thanks for helping out by spreading the word on your social media. If you want to tell your friends, fellow artists and fans about Howler 2024's newsletter, please send them to https://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/newsletter
Reminder: videos and tutorials
on YouTube
Stay up to date on new features here:
https://www.youtube.com/pdhowler
We wish you a safe and healthy Happy New Year - And thank you again for waffling and howling!!
Team Dogwaffle
https://www.pdhowler.com
https://www.thebest3d.com
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