PD Howler 2023 is powered by Project Dogwaffle. At its core it is a paint (!) program. It also includes multiple brushes and numerous fancy tools for animation, 3D landscape modeling, creating particle-based clouds, and now also volumetric clouds that cast shadows on each other. There are a ton of video editing tools, frame by frame or for blocks, such as motion estimated interpolation, painting with video on video, using music to affect brush sizes (Orbicles brushes), particle brushes for full foliage and trees in one brush stroke, and a large number of special effects filters.

Summary of Main Features:

• Digital painting with multiple types of brushes, including natural media brushes, pigment lifting, particle brushes, foliage brushes, custom image and animated brushes, plus a huge collection of filters, many of them animated(!) and key-framable, both on the main canvas and in the animated brush!
• Video frame editing and post work for special FX, traditional frame-by-frame animation, and working with video on video, motion estimated interpolation, frame processing, stabilizing,tracking, chroma keying, green screen, compositing, rotoscoping, etc.
• 3D capabilities including elevation map based 3D terrain generation, global illumination and ray tracing on CPU and in the GPU!

A few more details:

Paint features:

• Natural media, multiple presets, fully customizable
• Full tablet support
• Custom brushes, bristle brushes, particle brushes, brushes under the influence of force fields
• 3D orbiting particle brushes (Orbicles) that can respond to sound
• Dynamic Rules-based 9-generational foliage brushes
• Animated (multi-frame) custom brushes (aka animbrushes)
• Pigment lifting for even more realistic paint effects
• about 200 fast & full featured filters. Real-time is our middle name.
• Premium color mixing tools. Red-yellow-blue, palette mixer, lots more.
• Multi-monitor support
• Mirror mode and Symmetrical painting, Kaleidoscope mode
• Frame your artwork
• brush keying
• tablet support

Animation features:

• Traditional animation
• Onion skin
• Load/Save AVI's, frame sequences, new: save to mp4 and wmv
• Frame scanning
• Line cleanup and non-photo blue removal
• Timeline to apply filters
• Exposure sheet with lip syncing
• Frame sequencer
• Rotoscoping matte creation
• Motion analysis to create slow motion or add motion blur to stop motion
• Animated brush timeline
• Animated brush keyframer
• Animation retiming
• Interlaced video support
• Batch processing
• Batch conversion and renaming
• Particles, 3D hight map, etc.
• Image stabilization. Camera motion smoothing, removal and re-addition.
• Motion tracking in Brush keyframer
• Motion prediction for frame extrapolation and selective motion blurring
• Mirror transform (vertical/horizontal) all frames of an animation
• frame-level and block-level editing (in/out markers, copy, paste, cut, delete, insert, reverse sequence order, make loopable, time stretching with frame blending...)
• animated swap channel and alpha channels from DWA or AVI files
• animated renderings in Raytracing with Puppy Ray

Filters and Special FX: (this is NOT the complete list)

• Numerous filters (140 and counting)
• Filters for still images + Filters for animations
• Adjust: Color, Value, Threshold, Saturation, Hue/Sat/Val, Auto balance, Tint, Value only contrast, Levels, Curves, Color FX, Adjust All...
• Color: Map to current gradient, Negative, Invert value, Swap channels, Roll channels, Power curve, Posterize, Color replacer, Solarize, Sepia, Halftone, Halftone plus, Graphic halftone, Duotone, Tritone, 12-bit dither, 8-bit-dither, 1-bit-dither (Optimized, Error diffused, random,...)
• Blur: Simple blur, Box filter, Gaussian blur, Custom blur, Motion blur, Zoom blur, Mystic vision, Chroma blur, Radial blur
• Photographic: Soft contrast improvement, Light diffusion, Star filter, Fish eye, Fog filter, Sunset, Polarize, Day for night, Remove red from selection
• Sharpen: Sharpen, Unsharp mask, Digital photo enhance, maX sharpen
• Convolve: Grey emboss, Color emboss, Edge detect, Sobel edge detect, Color sobel edges, Maximum, Median, Minimum, MaxMin, MinMaxz, High pass, Abs, Gradient convolve, Convolution kernel, Iterative median, Adjustable median, Adjustable maximum, Adjustable minimum
• Noise: Value noise, Color noise, Jitter, Jitter blur plus, Film grain
• Transform: Transform, Shift, Warp mesh, Isometric 3d, 3D Designer with erosion and texture coloring based on Slope AND Elevation, Puppy-Ray GPU Path-traced rendering with photorealistic animated water, Spherize, Globe, Textrix, Z noise, Twirl, Crystalize, Sinoid, Mosaic, Quilt, Rubber sheet, Wave distort, Mirage, Mirror, Fisheye correction, 3d perspective
• Video: Slate color bars, De-interlace, Reverse fields, Reduce flicker, Video lines, Legalize (NTSC), Legalize (PAL), Countdown, TV pixels, Raster lines, Shift RGB, Repair dropput
• Artistic: Apply current paper, Wet paint, Brush strokes, Tarnish, Weave, Graphic Pen, Oilify, Cross contour, Woodcut
• Stylize: Lighting tool (3D), Glowing edges, Plastic wrap, Waxify
• Render: Plasma noise, Bumby toy, Noises (Perlin1, 2, Fractal, Cosine), Radiant, Sky, Dread plating, Cellular, Checkerboard, Cold lava, Europa, Starfield, Brick texture, Woodgrain, Grid, Zrings, Mandelbrot, Triangles, Color cubes... NEW: OBJ Geometry loader/Renderer
• Animated: Starry night, Animated glows and flares, Wiggle warp, Time shift RGB, Multi frame spherize, Tunnel, Wave in breeze, Sunset, Film flicker, Confetti, Multicolor, Time slice by alpha, Stabilize, Merge (keep selection opaque), Fill selection, Stroke path,Motion prediction module, Apply mirror, Undo buffer to animation
• Combine with Swap: Mix buffers, Alpha blit, Premultiplied alpha blit, Additive, Subtractive, Multiply, Divide, Screen, Luminance, Complement, Difference, Around grey, Greater than, Less than, Texturize, Binary, Hue, Sat, Val, And, Or, Xor
• Composite with Swap: Green screen, Blue screen, Color key
• Displace by Swap: Displace, Cloaking displace, Pool displace, Jitter displace, Colortwirl displace
• Emboss by Swap
• and many more: LUA filters (gluas), DoggyFX, AnyFX for PD (by Pixelan), other 3rd-party plugins, make your own (free programming API), Array to Animation, Audio Recorder, Average Frames, CalendarWidget, Channels, Clock, Clock2, DogLuaBrowser, DogLuaEdit, Fieldpack, Forcefield, FramefromClipboard, Halloween_Clock2, Hexadecimal Picker, HexPackedCOlor, MatteCutter, MediaPlayerWidget, ModDogPlayer, Mouth, NumericSelect, Penny, Black hole, BlueRemove, Brick texture, LightBloom, Mirrage, Oilify, RandomFlares, SmudgeStick, Triangles, Tunnel, Wave distort, Wave in Breeze, Composite with image sequence (Greenscreen, Bluescreen, Color key, Alpha key(!), Cell edge composition), Ghosting, Snow fall, Old film, Lightning, heavenly animated Lens flares ...

Some buzzwords and highlights:

Highlights of our favorite, recently added or enhanced tools:

• Motion Prediction Module - (Motion Estimation)
• Pigment Lifting
• Roto scoping
• Matte Tracking
• Foliage Brushes (oh so many!)
• 3-D Designer for Terrains and stuff from Elevation Maps
• GPU based fast rendering
• Apply mirror to animation
• Phenomenal Curve tool, simulated tablet pressure (if painting with mouse)
• Clone fill, Continuous Fill ("paint" fill)
• Crystalize with 3D look
• 3D lighting effects
• Beehive swarming your brush pointer: the Orbicle brushes, with sound FX
• Super-impressive Bristle brushes
• Kaleidoscope mode
• Mandelbrot, Julia set and other fractals, with animation(!)
• numerous layer modes (just not opaque :-( ) - but there's greenscreen and many more

What's New or Recent? (2022/2023 editions)

The latest 2 years have brought a plethora of new gadgets and tools, you can learn more about them at thebest3d.com/2022 and thebest3d.com/2023

• API in C++ for fast GPU usage. Check the youtube playlist
• Water colour brushes now include Ocean Waves
• Stored image can be copied to Clipboard directly
• Anti-aliased Algorhytmic (AA) pen can use various paint modes
• New 1-3 point perspective guides
• New undo browser
• New sky rendering filter with volume clouds
• Select your preferred accelerator card
• New noise tool and open simplex noise
• New Mandelbrot and Julia set exploration features
• Improved floating color picker
• GUI improvements. New combo box control
• New print panel, settings panel
• Updated Europa filter, Lorenz attractors
• Realistic impasto brushes
• Brush size envelopes for rectangles, circles, lines, and curves
• The painter's color wheel
• Gamut masks
• 3D geometry tool - the start of OBJ loader/parser/renderer re-imagined
• Color temperature filter
• Continuous paint fill mode
• Brush rotation parameter