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 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.

This tutorial/ how to describes how I created my image weird.

Step 1.
To begin I opened an image that I had previously created with the software Bryce.

Bryce image (click image for larger view)

I applied two Transform filters Warp Mesh, I made it with a 8 grid X and a 6 grid Y, and Smudge to obtain a new form.

Transform filter - Wrap mesh (click image for larger view)

These are only 2 of many powerful filters, which are really nice to utilize to get random compositions.

Step 2.
I then reworked the image I obtained using the Brush effects Smudge to smooth certain parts which I found too irregular. I used various sizes and opacities, depending of the result I wanted to get. I again added some Transform filters Twirl, and Wave Distort.

Transform filter - Twirl	Transform filter - Wave distort

I changed from the green harmony to a blue one with the Adjust Color Filter.

Adjust color filter

Step 3.
I used the airbrush, to darken certain parties, this to avoid a certain dullness in the distribution of the surfaces of my composition. Each new action with the brush on the picture can be done on a different layer, which can be simply erased in case of non-convenience without affecting the previous image.

I also wanted to have more accuracy when working with the brushes, so I resized my image to 300 dpi in > image > resample. Then, the larger size of the image made appear a lot of tiny defaults - irregulars borders on the shapes, which I made smoother with a large airbrush, medium size, low opacity, choosing the color I needed directly on the picture with The turkey baster tool, a very useful tool!

Step 4.
At last I applied another filter. The photographic sunset filter to obtain the final gradation.

Sunset filter

Weird 04_1 by Bernard Dumaine

Click here to read the review of PD Pro 4 by Bernard Dumaine.

Availability & Pricing
PD Pro 4 is available as a download of about 20 MB and costs only $119 USD.

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PD Particles, PD Pro and Project Dogwaffle are trademarks of Dan Ritchie. 
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