Excellent Animation Composite Tutorial!

Dartanbeck

Dan Ritchie is showing off a newly enhanced feature of PD Pro: Howler 9.6
In This Video he talks about "the old days" of using optical printing to make multiple exposures to exact the composition of several film reels into one final shot.

The new filter, and how well we can implement it, will make this stuff not only easier, but a lot of fun! Check it out!

Want to know more about what's new in the new Howler?
I have a short write-up in the thread.

Dartanbeck

Dan Ritchie is the creator and brainchild of Project Dogwaffle and PD Pro Digital painter. He is the programming department. For a more in-depth description of why and how Dogwaffle came about, read his welcome message.

Dan has been known amongst the 3D community for making plugins for 3D tools such as Lightwave 3D as well. Some of his plugins were later integrated into Dogwaffle. He has worked in 3D animation on special effects at Foundation Imaging and other fine production studios on projects like Star Trek Voyager, Starship Troopers, and other exciting sci-fi productions involving 3D animations and special fx.

Dan has a blog at http://danritchiehowler.blogspot.com/

Dan also has a brief site here with occasional special promotions: http://www.wix.com/dan_ritchie/howlerpromotion

In fact if you're interested in sponsoring and supporting Dan, with donations to help him keep a roof over his head at night and food once a day in his tummy, from an artist to a starving artist with love, he will say more than one prayers for you. (There is a Donation box link on the bottom of that page there). Thanks for spreading the word, thanks for helping, and God bless you!

And thanks again for waffling! so there. You can learn more about Dan on his personal site at squirreldome.com

Jonstark

I picked up PD Howler 9.2 last week on the day where daz was offering the $20 coupon, so I felt like I got a good deal. I only needed it for the purpose of compositing animation layers atop each other (specifically I wanted a tool that could take a Carrara hair pass and bring it into an Octane for Carrara render animation.

Spent most of yesterday trying to figure out how PD howler works, well for this small purpose :) I admit I struggled a bit, and sometimes it seemed that I was getting different results in the different ways I tried to get layers together and combine swap images with the filters, but eventually I prevailed. I was left feeling that Howler is going to be very useful for animation composition, even if it seems a little finicky at times (on the other hand, it was more likely user error that caused me so much difficulty at first, even though I spent most of the day playing with it, by the end of the day I seemed to be able to get it to do what I wanted).

I know Howler can do a heck of a lot more than what I'm using it for, it's nice to know I have it in my toolkit if I need it. Wanted to thank you for turning me onto it. Even if I don't know 90% of what it can do (yet) :)

Oh here's the finished animation with Carrara hair in an Octane animation, it took me quite a while to figure out, but in the end PD howler helped me prevail. Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75PP_mI6SHE

(forgive the animation, it was a test only and not meant to be impressive)

Dartanbeck

Cool! I'm really glad that you've taken the plunge, and hope that you get a chance to get into the tutorial videos that Philip makes on the "pdhowler" YouTube channel. I know... Howler (and PD Artist) behave and operate differently than your average image editor, and that the titles of the video tutorials don't always represent all that the tutorial might include. So it can take some time to catch a grasp of how the become somewhat proficient. But after a bunch of practice doing normal editing along with my more advanced needs that drew me towards it, I can now do things more comfortbly in Howler than in PhotoShop Pro, Gimp, or whatever. But it did take some practice.

In one of the more recent videos Dan shows how he uses stored images very similarly to how we would normally use layers in other software, which can be very useful to learn. I use the Swap buffer a lot. The fact that layers act so incredibly different than what we were used to is the first thing to try a get our heads around. But just wait... Once you start getting into some more of the really wonderful animation tools you'll start using them more and more! Most of the filters are now animatable, and if you need one to be that isn't already, just send them an e-mail and you just might get your wish!
I asked if he could add "Oilify" to the animated filters... the next day I had it! :)

Again, just taking some time to sit back and let Philip show you around the interface and watch him make examples on the screen can be an immense help. He'll be using the tools to do something entirely different than what you want to do, and that light bulb will go off... so you back it up a bit and watch it again - then try it in Howler and go: "Oh Yeah! This is too freaking cool!"

Jonstark

I watched the 2 tutorials from the animation series over and over, particularly the spaceship he animated over some stars flying by, and the one where he took a dragon gargoyle that was animated flapping its wings and put it into a flyover animation of a terrain, between the 2 I think I got the seeds of the basic concepts and terminology I needed, at least what I was using it for, but I can see there are lots more tutorials to watch, and I know there's a ton more this app can do.

I didn't realize a new version was just around the corner when I bought it, that's kind of cool. Looks like the dev cycle for this is very fast. Me being from a Carrara background I'm... not used to that (to put it mildly) :)

Dartanbeck

Yeah, it has a one-man development team and he is very ambitious and amazing at what he's doing with this. It's really quite fun to keep following the cycle! ;)
I can't even imagine what would happen if he took over ownership of Carrara. But I bet we'd see a lot of new magic at a constant rate of development.

Jonstark

Dartanbeck said:

I can't even imagine what would happen if he took over ownership of Carrara. But I bet we'd see a lot of new magic at a constant rate of development.

Wouldn't that be a kick? I can see from several of the tutorial vids that they are very pro Carrara, you can see the Carrara icon on their desktop and they reference using Carrara all the time. I think there's even a rigging tutorial for a dragon they did in Carrara (though I may be mixing them up with someone else). I wonder how much of a pipe dream it would be...

Dartanbeck

Philip Staiger, the Howler guru that makes most of those videos, used to work on Carrara for Eovia! ;)
Dan, the developer, did some special FX work on some of the Star Trek stuff, Starship Troopers, and others, which kind of helps to explain why Howler has a lot of the different types of animation techniques built into it. Lots of tools for lots of different needs. Even Sprite Sheets for storyboard-style animation creation! I love this stuff!

Have you tried just painting in Howler yet? Try exploring some of the many particles brushes and such sometime. Amazing stuff. Click on the "Rules" button to see how you can actually go in and completely design a particles system brush that will do whatever you program it to do - where, where, how strong and with how much gravity... it's like having custom studio software in your own house! :)

Like I said, it took me some time to get used to it. But I sure love Howler over any image editor I've ever used. I can draw with a pencil, paint with paint, smear what I already have down with a tool that has no pigment of its own - just as if I'm actually smearing the image... very neat stuff.

I notice that Philip has been working on playlists in the YouTube channel. Before that, I've created some playlists of my own, putting the videos in the order that they're supposed to be in, and created a bit of an Index for Dogwaffle Video Tutorials to help myself figure out where I want to go with my training. I just loved the "Daily Dose" series!