More options upcoming in PD Pro's particle system

#1 Nice, very nice.

This works directly with Torque or as a seperate app? (how much does it cost?)

To be honest it's the first time I have ever seen this software.

#2 It's a standalone program, saves to Targa with alpha (32-bit) so you can map it to billboards. Saves other formats used commonly too like PNG, Bmp, Tiff, Jpeg... I'd stay away from the PSD format, it's buggy. It's a known problem and we haven't found where or why, it uses an external converter and we can't seem to fix it. It used to work and broke at some point. Weird. Oh well, who needs PSD anyway, right? LOL


The lite edition of PD is on sale here at GG. It's $19 and it's called PD Particles.

The latest Pro version (which will have these new features shown above) is version 4.0c, at $119. Version 3.5 comes close in terms of particle features (it does have some stuff not found in PD Particles too, like the forcefields introduces in 3.5). That version 3.5 is $79 (used to be $97).

To compare what's new in recent patches, check www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/whatsnew

You need to tell GG if you want them to carry PD Pro too. I'd be happy to oblige ;-)

If youre on a Mac use Parallels for Mac to run PD products, PD Particles and PD Pro have be tested to run great with it. www.thebest3d.com/parallels


For an example of foliage mapped onto billboard polys in an animation (this one using Carrara), check the PD Particles tutorials at www.thebest3d.com/pdp/tutorials

If you go for PD Particles please order it here at GG. And then contact me to get your upgrade discount coupon to go Pro later with us directly unless PD Pro is added at GG some day.

-Philip

#3 That hairy skull image is one of the most exciting 2D images i've seen in a long time. V. Nice !

but Philip - i think you're going to continue to have confused people out there by calling it a Particle System. when folks read that, they're probably going to think it's a particle library for use in a game, not a paint program based on particle systems.

keep up the awesome work!
Orion

#4 Philip,

I'm currently using PD Pro 3.5 and can't afford to upgrade right now, but the new features look pretty good.

One feature I would love to see in PD Pro is a wraparound canvas for making seamless tiling textures. Painter Classic had that and I loved it. PhotoSeam is the only other program I know that has a wraparound canvas.

#5 @Aaron photoshop filter/misc/offset is great for making seamless textures. Thats if you have photoshop.

I'm still confused at what this program is 'particles' or 'paint program'?

#6 PD Pro and PD Particles are both considered "natural" painting programs. More similar to Painter than Photoshop.

However, in addition to more traditional painting, PD has very nice particles assistance built into the brushes. It's pretty cool.

#7 PD (Project Dogwaffle) is what I call a rich-image editor, a painter with focus on brushes instead of layers.

PD Particles has internal natural media brushes and a type of brushes called particle brushes. As you draw and drag the mouse, it shoots particles right from under the cursor. The particles are subject to gravity, speed changes, mouse motion, they split, split angles, color gradients, etc... they can also shrink from an initial size, and they can generate their alpha channels along the way, which makes PD Particles great for gamedev when you need an alpha-mask enabled billboard image of tall grass, trees, shrubbery.

PD Pro also has other types of brushes. The core and real heart of PD is to define your own brushes with the custom brush pickup tool (shortcut: 'b' as in brush). And you can accumulate multipel images into a custom brush, making it an animated brush. In fact you can load an image file sequence, or Avi file, from disk into the current document (the image Main buffer) and play it at different speeds for previewing, and then you can transfer that frame sequence (or just a portion of it with rectangular selection pickup tool, or only a range of frames, from current frame to last). That effectively transfers a video clip in 2 clicks from AVI file or image sequence files into the custom animated brush system. You can then store and manage it, save it to favorites, etc... and you can of course paint with it, like TV paint, i.e. paint with it over the current frame, or if you hold the ALT key down it paints across the frames of the current animation. You paint video on video that way (and other ways, like the Brush keyramer, and stroke player)

Particles in PD Pro are even more powerful than in PD Particles, because in PD Pro there's those additional brush types like custom brush and custom anim brush. So you can select the 'Brush' style in the particles system? Use that to make the video clip that's in the custom animbrush play along the particle paths.

It also all responds to tablet pressure for size and opacity.

You will want to read a review by famed Tom Arah of PC Pro magazine, where he has his own column. He's reviewed upward of 250 products in his carreer, and didn't expect what he found. He loved the product, hated the name, but when he says things like "Why can't Photoshop do that?", or "every video artist should run to the nearest PC store and fight for their copy of PD Pro", I don't care if he dislikes the name.

PD has been around 10 years this year (last month). Has been free ware the first 6, and you can still find a free version 1.2 at www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/free

If you want to paint with video over video, or apply filters across the frames of an animation, don't stop at PD Particles, look for PD Pro. Or get a copy of the June issue of Computer Shopper magazine, it has PD 2.1 on it. And an upgrade coupon.

To earn more about what's possible, see

www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/whatscool
www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/art
www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/dotm (Dogwaffler of the Moment)

The main developer of PD is Dan Ritchie, a Holywood special FX animator who's worked on Star Trek Voyager, Starship Troopers (the tv series) and numerous others at Foundation Imaging until they went defunct one day suddenly. He's developed this set of tools with that in mind: paint gamical backdrops, great special FX,... so I like to say that PD is a bit some of Painter, some of Photoshop, some of After Effects, and a hell lot of DeluxePaint (D-paint) from the Amiga days 20+ years ago.


And yes, the name PD Particles could be confusing to those who imagine that particles have to be animated blobbies and smoke trails... and yes you can do that with it in PD Pro, and even in PD Particles for still images. The focus however is to paint it, and paint with it, and great fabulous lush or dry foliage effects along the road.

#8 Aaron, about making seamless textures: easy. PD Pro 3 has that.

But of course, you have to think different: the core of PD is not the image bugffer or layers, it's the brush. So grab a copy of the image into your brush (pick it up with the custom pickup tool for example or use menu:

Brush > Open...

to open the image from file.

Brush > Store & Manage can help to store it for immediate re-use

then use the 'Make Seamless' submenu in the Brush menu.

You will see options in fact to grab the image again, from the current custom brush or from the image buffer, so you really don't need to start with that image in the brush.

Then you can interactively make it seamless.

There's a 'Seamless_Plus' video tutorial somewhere in the many tutes in www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/tuts

You can control the amount of overlap. It fades into the edges. It's not doing anything like procesural morphing of course, just fading over.

The same it can also do across frames of an animation, to make and fade into a looping animation.

And you can turn explosions backward into implosions, or rain and snow fall into rising underwater bubbles by reversing the image sequence of the animation in the Animation>Frames... menu. That's my code there btw, and I'm quite proud of it ;-)

#9 Sounds and looks great but unfortunately the pro version is too costly (I don't like 'lite' versions of anything) and I spent a lot licensing CS3 and likes already.

Maybe next time I guess :(

I'll keep an eye on the project though.

#10 Well, I hear ya. But be warned that PD Particles is not much of a lite version. It's got the basics, but it just doesn't have custom brushes, so you can't push that type of brush across particles either.

At $19, we couldn't really put everything into PD Particles.

But there are alternatives: Some are free. PD 1.2 is fre and does have custom brushes (but its codebase dates back to 2.0a and thus it lacks some of the nicer features of PD Particles's particle system, like shrinking lines. It's not a 'lite version' defficiency, mind you, it's just a flashback in history. It dates back 3 years, and 1.2 has stopped evolving.

There's also PD Artist at $39, with still more focus on painting, less on animation.

You could also find the June issue of Computer Shopper magazine, and find PD 2.1 on the CD (a $59 value!)

And as for PD Pro, when we introduced PD Pro 4 which is good for Vista and multi-core systems, and faster and better and faster again, we decided to still also keep v3.5 out there, and lowered the price from $97 to $79, because that puts it in a much more attractive bracket for many more users. Given that in many states and some countries you don't get taxed for downloadable non-tangible product ordered on the internet, it's nice to have it in download form. It's a flat and final $79

If you have PD Particles, note also that we consider that a sidegrade from PD Particles if you're considering to move up to PD Pro 3 or 5 (or even to PD Artist), and we thus offer a discount coupon for your purchase of the full version. If you don't have such a coupon, just ask me at dogwaffle@thebest3d.com-removethis or admin@Thebest3d.com-removetthis. I'll need a date of purchase and order confirmation ID. You get a coiupon good for a discount that is equivalent to about $24. More than what you paid for when buying PD Particles (except if heavilay taxed with VAT). The next result is that you only pay about $57 for PD Pro 3.5

Remember that next time you fill up the gas tank at the gas station.... it's usually really not that hard to come up with this little bit of money when you can trade it for a few meals. It;s more a matter of whether you really want it and can trade it for something else you already do get regularly: gas, food, cable TV, cell phone service with text messaging, a weekly outing to the movies or at the pub with drinking buddies...... life's menay necessities ;-)

And I know these things because sometimes I go play soccer on Sundays and it's a 30 minute drive, and I sometimes don't go, because it saves me $5-$6 in gas and after saving it 3 weekends I'd have enough lunch money saved for the kids the following week. which feels good too.


That all said, CS3 is a killer app. In its most vicious sense ;-)