October 2006 TheBest3D.com has announced the release of Project Dogwaffle Professional 4, the newest major edition of PD Pro and is the successor to the acclaimed and award-winning PD Pro Digital Painter 3.x, also known as Project Dogwaffle Professional. PD Pro 4 is a natural paint and animation software program developed by Hollywood special fx artist, animator and novelist Dan Ritchie.
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I had the pleasure to review PD Pro 4 for 2Dvalley.com. PD Pro is a natural painting program. It's called a natural painting program because it let you copy the effects of traditional materials like and oil paint, watercolor but also charcoal, tempera or pastels. Here are some impressions about PD Pro 4 which I would like to share with you. I never worked with any of the previous versions, so all was new for me. I was pleasantly surprised by PD Pro 4 and it also inspired me to work digitally again after some traditional works I created.
The interface
The interface has a professional look and the window submenus offers a wide range of possibilities, including animation! I have to say, I never use many of them (As I do with every imaging software, it's just a personal choice regarding the way I work digital).
The interface is completely customizable. From the Window menu you can choose which panels you want to show. You can choose from many panels; like a layers panel, a color panel, a brush settings panel, a brushFX panel, and many more.
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PD Pro 4 interface - Click image for larger view |
A new feature in PD Pro 4 is the user centric interface. Each tool in PD Pro now displays a context bar below the menu bar, containing commonly used functions for quick selection.
Another handy new feature is the Favorites tool. Previously separate media types like internal media, custom media, and particles are now accessible under a single menu. The Favorites tool let you organize your media into separate folders for separate projects. Now you can use just the tools you like without cluttering up your workspace.
Also new is that the Pigment profiles are now fully integrated. They work with the build in color selection tools, many which have been added in version 4, like the Color harmony panel. It's now possible to pick complementary or analogous colors the same way a traditional artist would. In the RGB system, complementary color choices are not the same as in the traditional red, yellow, blue color model. The complement of yellow is blue instead of purple, and so on.
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Color wheel |
Color mixer |
Color harmony |
PD Pro makes a lot of use of the mouse. Right clicking on most tools often brings up additional options.
Brushes & presets
The main feature of PD Pro is the endless possibilities you have with the brushes. You can choose between three brush types; an anti-aliased algorithmic pen, an internal brush or a custom brush.
In most ways, these brush types can be used interchangeably, however each type has its own advantages.
You can very easily create your own custom brush.
After you have created your own brush, you have loads of things you can do with it. You can scale it, rotate it, change its colors, store it for later (and store multiple brush images at the same time), you can save the image by itself or save the brush with all its settings with the media manager.
If you like you can add a FX and even animate your brush by loading a few images into a single brush, and then draw the frames along a path. There are extra settings if you use a tablet; you can set the pressure controls, size, and opacity.
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Main brush settings |
Custom brush settings |
Post FX settings |
PD Pro offers a broad range of presets and materials that all can also be used as a brush. You can choose from many presets categories including: airbrush, pen, pencil, oil, tempera, pastels, watercolors, effects, organic effects, particles.
Besides the presets and materials you can also choose for particles brushes or bristles. Particles brushes are procedural brushes that can do various things such as render grass and trees, animate waterfalls, fairy dust, and fire, or simulate traditional media, like a bristle brush. Great for turning a photograph to a unique piece of art that appears hand painted.
You also have the option to add a paper texture to your brush which can add a 3D surface look and bumpiness to your painting.
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Bristles presets |
Paper texture - Click image for larger view |
Filters & plugins
Filters or plugins can be used to modify your current selection or to create an original background image. All the basic filters which you would expect are there like; noise, blur, sharpen, adjust, and color plus some great other filters like sunset, day for night, some very cool transform filters and also some very nice render filters. Most filters can be adjusted with your own settings but not with all.
PD Pro has an expansion capability in the form of plugins. Plugins are external programs that are able to work with PD Pro. There are some plugins that come with the program that do not have a regular menu item, like the Cross Contour filter. Plugins are categorized into five groups, Filter, Import, Export, Brush, and Misc.
Animation
PD Pro has a full animation sub system built in, with tools like onion skin, filmstrip, timeline, exposure sheet, brush key framer, and more. I had no real experience in animation and found the animation process in PD Pro rather easy to use, although I am rather bad with techniques. I still don't like to read the manuals, I prefer to discover software instinctively when creating something, and here it just worked fine. There are still some menus which I didn't use like the exposure sheet. But that gives me something to explore in the future. Below you can see 'A' one of my first surreal animations I created with PD Pro 4. The image I used is from Deborah Valentine stock photos from Deviantart.com.
The animation option really ads something extra for me to PD Pro. The animation option is powerful enough to create real traditional animated short stories.
Take a look here at
the sample animations; you can see that there is a lot of possible with just a little practice.
Import & export
You can open 60+ different file formats including Camera Raw data. The default file format of PD Pro is Targa. PD Pro can save images as BMP, JPG, PNG, PSD, and TIFF images. The animations can be saved as a DWA format, as a sequence of images or as an AVI file.
Patches
Frequently a new patch will be released for PD Pro 4 which will fix a bug or add a new feature to the program. These patches can be downloaded for free. Patches for PD pro 4 that already has been released include a remove red from selection filter which is ideal to remove red eyes from your photos, the marching ants visibility along selection boundaries can be toggled on/off. This can be useful for clarity in identifying what's been selected. Large addressing to enable working with very large images, a value slider has been added to the Snowfall filter as a new feature. If you want to see more improvements click here to go to the update patches page at the best3D.com.
Conclusion
I only have tried out some basic functions in PD Pro and can only conclude that PD Pro is real value for your money. If you look for a program that can paint natural effects but doesn't want to pay that much $ and get profesional results PD Pro is just what you are looking for. I also see it as a great addition to Photoshop because PD Pro has the ability to import and export PSD files and Photoshop doesn't have the ability to paint with real natural effects like PD Pro. The possiblity to create animations is also a great extra option and gives me something to futher explore in the future. Although the interface is quite simple to understand and learn some experience with graphic software is a plus.
Click here to go to a short tutorial for PD Pro by Bernard Dumaine.
Availability & Pricing
PD Pro 4 is available as a download of about 20 MB and costs only $119 USD and PD Pro 3.5 is currently available for a new lower price of $79.
The best3D.com
PD Particles, PD Pro and Project Dogwaffle are trademarks of Dan Ritchie.
Visit Dan Ritchie's homepage: Squirreldome.com
