Hello, here is another issue of the Dogwaffler of the Moment newsletter. We have a few new Animation tutorials and another set of toon brushes for free downloading - batch #3 is here!
 
As usual, please discover new galleries, slideshows, and freebies at http://www.thebest3d.com

 

Toon Brushes - Batch 3 is here!

 

As you may recall, Michel Agullo has donated a bunch of his 3D cartoon characters as brush images for users of Dogwaffle. Some are available in standard PNG files so you can even use them in other programs. You might also find them of use in 3D renderings and animations.

See for example further below a new tutorial that uses some of these images (elephant and monkey) as an image to be warped into a shape-changing closed outline, defined by the Curve tool.

This is to announce that a new batch of 19 images has been released. This time, they are already in Dogwaffle media format. We've loaded the original PNG file into the brush (custom image brush) and saved them in the Brush media browser. We created a new category for it, Stickers_b3. However, you are not required to keep them in that category. You can place the media files into a new or an existing category, whatever you prefer to help your workflow.

Find batch 3 of the free toon brushes here:
http://www.thebest3d.com/howler/download/index.html

 


 

New Videos and Tutorials - focus on Animations

 

Just a reminder: you can find many tutorials here on our youtube channel:
 
http://www.youtube.com/pdhowler

A good starting point for many more tutorials is at http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/tuts

 

 Video #1 - Fun with Animations - Warp Fill

This tutorial shows using the Curve tool for a closed curve to define a shape, and then keyframing a few changes of the shape across the timeline. Then the curve is used to define a selection, and that selection is thus animated according to the changes in its shape. The last step is then to make it render a selected image that's been loaded into the custom brush, and using one of the Warp fill modes in order to squeeze the image into the animated, changing shape.
 
 This can lead to fun animated dance moves. You can easily make it loopable by setting the last keyframe to match the first keyframe. It actually does that automatically, but you still will want to know where to re-inforce that in case to messed with it. 
 Here is the link on Youtube:
 
 http://youtu.be/tORloQUIYqc
 
 Please share this link with your friends on your social media if you like it.
 

 

 Video #2 - Compositing a spaceship over a background animation

 
 There are many ways to work with Dogwaffle, especially PD Howler, when you deal with animations. Imagine for example that you rendered an animated background scene, and that you also separately rendred an animation of something closer, to be seen in the foreground. Perhaps a walking character. Or perhaps a flying spacecraft.  You now wish to combine the too into a single animation, and make it look like the spacecraft is indeed flying in front of that animated background.
 
 There are several ways to do this, and your workflow will vary depending on whether you are working with image sequences or with a single animation file such as AVI. Dogwaffle as tools for compositing at several levels too, such as when you use images with alpha channel or without, and you have to find other ways to mask off the foreground character or spaceship so that its background turns transparent and it can be safely composited over the desired background animation.
 
 In this video we show some of the new ways to load an animation from AVI that carries just the RGB channel, hence the color. A separate AVI file can carry the mask. That mask can either already exist if you had created it during rendering. In some 3D programs like Carrara, you can render the mask, or the depth, or the object ID, or many other details as part of the multi-pass rendering options that you have available when rendering out to image sequences. However, what can you do when you rendered into an AVI file? You might get enough of a selection mask from the color channels if it was rendered against a color that is unique enough that you can safely cue and key to it.
 
 Learn more about some of the ways to work with and combine multiple animations in this video tutorial:

 
 Combining multiple animations with alpha masks
 http://youtu.be/7ks_F3j8ESI
 
 In this example, we're using a simple spacecraft that was modeled and animated in Anim8or, a free 3D program. Learn more about Anim8or at http://www.thebest3d.com/anim8or
 
 The animated 3D background scene was created in Project Dogwaffle, PD Hwoler 9, using of course the new Puppy Ray raytracing engine to animate through a 3D terrain defined by a simple elevation map. It takes just a few seconds to set up and a little longer to render, depending of course on your system's performance. Note that in Howler 9.1 we'll have some more speed improvements, coming with GPU support!
 
 
 

 Video 3 - Coming Soon

 
 As of this writing, the video is not completed yet, but we're working on a third video that will not be narrated but instead just shows a screen capture of turning a cloud into terrain and flying through it. We might turn this also into a more sophisticated tutorial in the near future, we're thinking of calling it "Cloudy, with a chance of Puppies!"
 
 You will be able to see this and subsequently related videos in the youtube channel at
 
 http://www.youtube.com/pdhowler
 
 as well as
 
 http://www.thebest3d.com/howler/tutorials
 
 
 If time permits, we'll also include it in the web edition of this newsletter, at http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/newsletter
 
 Thanks for watching!
 
 
 
 

And as always, thanks again for waffling and howling! Please consider posting some of these links to your Facebook or other social media channel(s),... we can use all the help we can get to spread the joy.
 

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