COMPANY: The Best 3D | URL: (See Buy links below) | TYPE: Standalone | PLATFORM: Windows | PRICE: $119
					PD Pro version 4.1 is the successor to the acclaimed and award-winning PD Pro Digital Painter 3.x, also known as Project Dogwaffle Professional. It is a paint and animation(!) program for Windows. You can paint with animations over animations, such as video. PD Pro was developed to enable artists to express free-thinking creativity in a different way, inspired by old-school traditional painting and animation techniques. Written by an artist and novelist who himself uses PD Pro on a daily basis, version 4 is now optimized for multi-processors such as Intel Core Duo and AMD X2. Powered by Project Dogwaffle, PD Pro is the top-of-the-line version of several paint and animation tools created by an artist, for the artist in you. Whether you like to dabble and sketch, or do some serious painting or even animation and post work on your videos and 3D rendered animations, PD Pro is made for you, the illustrator, animator, dreamer, student or starving artist. Welcome to nirvana! What's New in Version 4.1 PD Pro 4.1 has a new lens flare editor. Lens elements are rendered in a new high quality anti aliasing routine. Animated lens flares are now possible! This one is for the community of 3D animators who want to render an animation of their 3D scenes in front of a background scene with skies, and add a bright sun with lens flare reflections. You can control the position, intensity, and very intricate details of the lens flares. There is also a large number of pre-defined samples. Skies can now be animated. You have control over the speed of the clouds and their fractal noise function. Add realistic (or cool and funky) animated backgrounds to your presentations and slideshows, 3D animations and multimedia projects. PD Pro's Sky filter now sports an 'Animate' button, in which you can set the speed at which they move. You can also change their 'altitude' (z-speed) in fractal space, making them easily look like they change shapes. You can also fade the clouds in, or out. Bristle Brushes: new Presets and Size control slider. While PD Pro has had “real” bristle brushes as part of the particle system for ages, entries have been added for them in the preset menu and they are linked to the size slider. There's also a version of the popular “wave in breeze” Lua script integrated into the timeline. You can use it to make tall grass wave left to right as if there's wind blowing. Other enhancements: There's a new filter to create realistic woodcut engraved images. There's also a new duotone filter. Timeline enhancements include new dark diffusion (which has a cartoonifying effect), shadow vision, transition by alpha filters as well as animatable lens flares. Classic features have also been polished off, such as the mystic vision filter having a higher quality setting. Perlin noise has new parameters, and there's a color version of perlin noise. Plus you can create custom transitions by defining them with a bitmap image. Age decrementing on particle brushes: make roots, branches and twiggs now looking even more realistic. As you're painting with the particle brushes, the generations of particles are getting older and older, and the size is accordingly reduced, as well as their lifespan. What starts as a thick and tall trunk turns into medium sized branches and eventually into tiny twigs. Animated Swap buffer: The Timeline editor has always had a set of filters for displacing the frames of your animation by the image containined in the Swap buffer. Now you can go beyond a static displacement map: you can select a Dogwaffle animation file (*.dwa) to serve as an animated Swap buffer source. Thus, any animation can be used as animated displacement map. In fact, any filters that use the Swap buffer, including the 20 or so 'Combine with Swap' filters, can use the animated swap buffer now! The possibilities are amazing! Animated Dark Diffusion: a counterpart to the Light diffusion filter, this one causes a darkening around dark areas. It can be a great use for text that you want to give some depth to, as if it 'casts' its dark presence onto the surrounding environment. It's also useful for some Toon-like shader effects. Animated Shadow Vision: the counterpart to the Mystic vision filter, which sort of combines the zoom blur with the Light diffusion effect, causing a zoom blur only on the bright pixels in the image. This new filter 'casts' dark rays, using the dark pixels found in the image. It can be useful to very easily create the impression of volumetric clouds under the dark clouds of an animated sky system. The Woodcut filter: ever seen a black on white print from a woodcut? Ever wondered what a woodcut of your own portrait or favorite pet might look like? This new filter will easily create such an effect. Using Alpha to fade between animations: you can now load an animation in the main buffer as usual, and another as the swap buffer animation (from .dwa file), and use the Alpha channel to blend or fade the two frame for frame. Essentially this can be used to create myriads of fun effects that combine one video with another, perhaps with a mask looking like a keyhole, or binoculars, but where either 'channel' is animated. New presets for advanced media: contributions from various users of Projct Dogwaffle are included with this release or with more free downloads to come in the freebies area. Animated waving in the breeze: load an image into the custom brush or generate something new with particle brushes, such as tall grass or a bush, and use this new filter in the animated Timeline's new 'Brush' secgtion to transform it in a motion swaying left to right as if animated by a breeze. Ready for updating? If you have version 4.0, this is a free update: What Was New in Version 4.0 and 4.0a-c 4.0 was a major release, with numerous improvements and changes to the user interface, plus higher performance and features. The prior major release, PD Pro 3.0, came in January 2005, and was followed by numerous free updates. PD Pro 4 will be followed up with even more new features and performance enhancements as well as support for Vista and new hardware to come, such as quad-processors and higher-end configurations. The developer is obsessed with high-end performance for professional users. *New user-centric interface makes more of PD Pro's power easier to use, more easily accessible. *More speed and flexibility. PD Pro is optimized with the latest state-of-the art techniques for real-time feel and operation, using multiple threads to render some filters and effects much faster on multi-core systems (HT, Dual Core, X2,...). *New favorites list lets you organize and keep your favorite tools in an easy-to-use thumbnail browser. *New pigment profiles are much simpler, more flexible, and powerful than color swatches, palette mixers, or other schemes used in the past to represent the color of pigments in traditional painting medias. Pixel profiles are fully integrated, along with newly integrated color tools like the Color harmony tool. *Better integration of existing tools, plus dozens of optimizations, tweaks, fixes and improvements requested by users and beta testers. *Faster layer mixing. •Redeye removal tool as a filter named "Remove red from selected" under the Photographic filters menu. *Menu item for DoggyFX plugin, added under the Filters>Video menu if DoggyFX is installed. *The Snowfall filter now also has a value slider, as a new feature *Two additional filters are now explicitly multithreaded and should run even faster on multi-core systems: Value only contrast, and color noise. *Marching Ants visibility along selection boundaries can be toggled on/off "Lite" versions of PD Pro are available, as follows: PD Particles PD Particles is a software program for sketching, doodling, painting and drawing with particles. It is loaded with features made for professionals, yet priced low enough for artists, students and hobbyists at all levels. If you like to draw, this is for you! PD Particles is perfect for PC users with a passion for creativity. It is based on a standalone version of the award-winning particle painting system called OptiPustics, found also in Project Dogwaffle. PD Particles also contains a number of fascinating natural fx brushes and can be used as a complete, self-contained painting program. However, it is primarily intended as a companion to your existing favorite photo editing, imaging and painting tools and it is focused on the use of a particular category of brushes: the Particle Brushes. PD Artist PD Artist is a paint toolbox, powered by Project Dogwaffle. The current version 1 is based on a subset of PD Pro 3. It's a great companion to your existing popular paint shop or photo image editor. There's also a little bit of animation capability, but the main focus is on painting and making it fun and realtime. But you can certainly combine the two uses: matte painting on image sequences, for example. Artwork created by Dan Ritchie, developer of PD Pro Digital Painter and Philip Staiger.
PD Pro 4.1 ($119)
	Upgrade from PD Pro 3.5 ($35)
	PD Artist ($39)
PD Particles ($19)
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