Be sure to check out our black Friday / Cyber Monday deals.  Things sure are heating up in the field of CG as vendors bring out their new wares and off huge discounts as well, and it's no exception with us.  Celebrating the release of Howler 9.5, we are slashing the prices this week over at http://dan-ritchie.wix.com/howlerpromotion, so be sure to stop by.

Lightwave renders. Exporting OBJ from Howler

Over on the PDHowler channel on Youtube, we've talked a lot about the new features of the 3D designer going into version 9.5 of Howler.  It is now possible to export an OBJ file.  Below are some examples that were rendered with Lightwave 3D using Howler to create the landscape and texture images.

Simulate high dynamic range imaging with local contrast

As you might guess, we here are fascinated with high dynamic range images.  We may be an 8 bit per channel paint app, and there are some good things about that, but sometimes you want to squeeze as much dynamic range into a single image as you can.  Enter the local contrast filter.

No, it's not a magic bullet, but it can do some amazing things with certain kinds of images.

What it does is examine an image, and apply a dynamic range enhancement to local parts of the image.  If a part of the image has a low dynamic range, it is stretched out to the full range.

This has the effect of simulating the look of images taken with a high-dynamic-range camera.  Caution is in order, however, as this can also "flatten" out the appearance of an image that otherwise uses color and value to convey a sense of depth in an image.  It's all a matter of artistic choice.

Local contrast can also ruin an otherwise fine image, so editing may be required via selections.  It seems to have trouble with skin tones, but boy oh boy does it ever seem to work brilliantly with pictures of bicycles!

Raytraced shadows are going into the 3D designer today.

Howler 9.5 will allow the creation of erosion masks that you can export, or use inside the program.

Ambient occlusion and slope shading filters

3D Designer love

Additive and multiply mode screen space ambient occlusion is now going into the 3D designer as of yesterday.  You can also add ambient occlusion directly to your texture with a new filter.

3D Designer is also getting a full floating point pipeline.  That allows for more intuitive lighting, brighter specular highlights.  And it's just better.

Howler 9.2 was recently featured on the Photoshop users groups.  That meeting was recorded and can be found here

https://experts.adobeconnect.com/_a204547676/p8eerb1n8t9?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

Today is Saturday, march 25, 2014, and we are committing the latest version (9.2) to feature lock.  This means that we have reached a point that no new features are going in to 9.2, and we are locking our sights on a release date and only fixing bugs from this point until release.

You can get a first look at what should be going into version 9.2 on TheBest3d at this page
http://www.thebest3d.com/howler/9/what-is-new-in-PD_Howler-v9.2_the-Worlds-Cutest-Trex.html

Yes, our codename for this one is "Worlds cutest T-Rex" which continues our tradition of references to various cartoons.

We entered Release Candidate (RC) state as of yesterday, and from here, we are only stopping for showstoppers.  Release will come when marketing is in place, and we are able.