The logline on our website (http://www.squirreldome.com/) sums up our 4 areas of focus: Paint, video, special effects, and performance. Howler is a digital painter with a focus on vfx.
About 4 years ago we decided that 3D was not going away, so we began developing a renderer and 3D pipeline that would gradually become part of our API. Our principle mission was to explore how 3D could be used in a 2D tool. 3D manifested in several areas of the program, including an animatable height map renderer and raytracer, a 3D lighting tool, several transformation tools, 3D enhancements to our foliage painting tool, enhancements to our particle painting tool, and most recently tools for the creation of landscape geometry such as erosion and sediment filters.
I (the developer) have been a 3D animator for around 20 years. I was an animator at Foundation Imaging for Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog and the Roughneck Chronicles, as well as a little Star Trek. After that I also worked on the Borg Invasion ride film. Way back, I also worked on some games in the days of the Atari Jaguar. Since those days, I have developed Howler full time, with a few years off for good behavior.
The original focus of Howler was purely as a natural media drawing tool with a Deluxe Paint like workflow for my own Silver Squirrel shorts. It quickly gained animation features akin to those found in Deluxe Paint as well, because I needed them. It also gained a timeline for applying keyframable filters, an exposure sheet, and a large number of other animation features, such as re-timing of frames via motion prediction because I needed them as an animator.
We do have a paint-only version of Howler called PD Artist, but Howler is meant to be a special effects tool. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. This may be the reason for some of the confusion. We’re not like the other programs that are just photo-editors or just painters. A special effects tool is going to be somewhat esoteric to some. Some users may be uncomfortable at first because we are not trying to solve the same problems that those other programs try to solve. We don’t have to be like everybody else, and that would be a fruitless endeavor for us. We are Howler. Just get used to the idea that you’re not going to be using it exactly the same way you use Photoshop. There’s just enough overlap in features that you might think that at first.
The interface uses buttons, scroll-bars and drop-down menus, ideas that have been around for 30 years or more. We spend probably ¼ of our development time on the GUI. Version 9.2 was a major overhaul of the interface code, although we have to keep buttons in more or less the same place to avoid confusing users. I think the confusion is that we are not at all Photoshop-like and people who “grew up” with it, consider it to be the standard of how all things work. But not everything has to be Photohop.
The final part of our focus, performance, is gained by embracing the latest technology such as SSE and GPU as much as we can. For example, we sport a GPU based raytracer, but we use the GPU in other places as well, such as our Mandelbrot filter, Bokeh blur (real lens) filter, and etc.
While we do spend a lot of time on 3D lately, we have not abandoned our original mission. We updated our painting tools significantly in version 8 and again in 9 (although Linux support through Wine took a lot of our time on that one) and again in 9.5 we fixed painting problems for users who had more than 12 cores. We also updated our onion skin feature for animators with more visible layers of onion skin and red shift to make it easy to discriminate between past and future frames. I think 3D just became the center of focus over the last several years because those were our newer tools, and they were being updated on a regular basis. Squeaky wheel.
Our future vision is the same as it has been, to continue to improve existing tools and add new ones, improve performance and the user experience. Hope that helps clear up some of the confusion about our product and direction. Thanks for reading. Dan R.