Project Howler 9.5 release, does anyone know what it's supposed to be now?

http://www.squirreldome.com/

On the top of the page it says it’s a digital painter, but in other areas you get the impression that it’s actually supposed to be another pathtracing engine centered around detailed terrain rendering, then you have screenshots showing what appears to be VFX and particle editing.

Does anyone know what this program is supposed to be or what it’s trying to become anymore? It seemed real promising a few years ago, but then it got a raytracer and it’s starting to seem like the developer is trying to throw in every possible thing under the sun with no real concrete roadmap on what the goal is (definitely not like its competitor Photoline which clearly shows an aim to be a photo-editing/texture making program).

Thoughts?

It is an artistic application - you create art in it. Good drawing tools, and all sorts of visual effects.

Having said that, it is one of the most neurotic pieces of software I have ever encountered :slight_smile:

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I do dislike the very inflexible GUI, though. I install it ever new version, try it, and then uninstall it again.

Less can indeed be more.

So, what is Photoshop? It started as a photo edting tool. It now can do decent to great work in 3D texturing too. And render OBJ files. And work with video.

I’d say Dogwaffle Howler is a bit like a mix of some features found in PS, AE and Painter. It sure is a painting program first, but the addition of 3D features is not a hindrance. If you don’t want 3D, stick with its painting features. You’ll notice though that some of the brushes, such as the foliage brushes, now render in 3D as you paint, and even do self-shading/ambient occlusion.

Oh sure, it doesn’t have a layering system compatible with PS. It does have layers, but not opaque ones unless you use color schemes to erase them to transparent and paint other colors as opaque. So, if you absolutely must have auto-opaque layers, this won’t do. But you can find plenty of other great tools in it. For someone who’s never done ray tracing and really just wants to do some landscapes based on infinite tiling of elevation amps, it’s pretty good, whether on the CPU or the GPU. VErsion 9.5 has support for multi-threading up to 64 cores on CPU. The 3D Designer and Puppy Ray raytracer are both also on GPU.

you’ll see plenty of examples at thebest3d.com too - such as this slideshow. http://thebest3d.com/slideshow9.5/index.html - and a bunch of tutorials at youtube.com/pdhowler -

You might particularly like the ability to export the terrain in 3D Designer as OBJ after applying erosion and sediments. Take it into Blender, for further rendering fun.

I’m curious: What part of the GUI is deemed inflexible?

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.

I appreciate your response. My main qualms about the GUI are:

  • I cannot seem to float the panels, or tear them off and rearrange them in groups.

  • No work spaces?

  • the panels are very small on my screen (2560x1440). I cannot seem to make those larger.

  • being so small it makes it very hard to work with the various panels. In many places the buttons and text is tiny. Can the GUI text size be set? The colour palettes cannot be enlarged either, it seems, making it unnecessary difficult to select specific colours. In Krita, for example, I can scale these up to full screen if required.

  • I can increase the thumbnail size in the layers palette, but the I cannot seem to make the column of palettes wider. The layer labels are obscured now. And when I restart Howler it forgets about my thumbnail size setting.

  • I can hide the column of palettes with that extremely narrow handle by clicking it, but then it becomes quite hard to flip it back - the handle is incredibly slim, and very hard to click with a wacom tablet.

  • dropdown menus get partly in the way of the menu entries. For example, I click on the “Selection” menu entry, and because I click on that (small) text near the top the dropdown obscures the menu items on the right. I am then forced to click outside the menu first, and then click on one of the menu items again, and often the same issue occurs again. The drop down menus do not behave like the “normal” ones in Windows, Mac, and Linux.

  • brush dropdown offers only text labels, and no preview icons. How am I supposed to know what each one will do? (I understand we can use the browse media window, though).

  • is there a brush stroke smooth option? Often quick strokes result in straight lines along the curves. Gimp, Clip Studio (Manga Studio), Krita, and Photoline provide such an option, and it really helps drawing nice strokes. It also avoids funky lines while drawing with very precise small lines.

  • I cannot seem to find an option to visually quickly control the brush size. In Photoline, for example, I can hold down the <ctrl> key to increase and decrease the brush size, and it will show me an outline while I do this. Same in Krita (with shift).

  • I cannot scale brushes beyond 100? They are often too small.

  • can I rotate the canvas while drawing?

  • controlling numeric input fields with the keyboard is a hassle: first click in the field, than cursor down, then left and right cursor to control the value. Why not just have up and down after clicking?

  • a number of dialogs are ill-designed. For example, the Timeline Editor. And when I add the animation controls I cannot float those? Or move them to the bottom of the screen?

  • It seems we can only have one document open at a time? I’d like to see tabs.

  • Non-coherent GUIs: Penny Paint opens in a new window that is far to large initially. The GUI is quite different compared to Howler. Different icons, etc. And because I work on three screens the Wacom tablet tracking is completely off.

  • I open the Browse Media window, and pin it. I close Howler. When I start Howler the Browse Media window is gone, and I am forced to open it manually once more. Cumbersome. This is also the case with, for example, the dope sheet, the timeline controls, and timeline editor.

  • a number of options that are now only available in a separate dialog could be consolidated with other dialogs or in a general non-modal panel/gui bar. For example: frame rate - that could be a simple dropdown/input field in the timeline controls, rather than a dialog.

…and there are many more GUI related things that could be so much improved. It’s a real shame, because I try each new version of Howler, and I try to like it (some unique features), and every time the GUI kills it for me. I have left Photoshop behind me since 18 months ago, so I am not exactly Adobe biased at all. Rather the opposite, actually.

I spent half an hour typing answers to your questions, but by the time I submitted it, it forced me to long in again, and everything got lost. So condensed version…

You can float the toolbar (window/layout/float toolbar)
The media browser shows previews for each media (well, pre-rendered versions anway) it’s right next to the dropdown list.
I’ll see if I can add up/down arrow keys for numeric.
Workspaces are on the list of things to do, albeit pretty low on the list.
Single documents was a tradoff because of the stuff we wanted to do out of memory instead of working from the hard drive. We use a store/restore set of features for images/brushes/selections/animation instead.
The quick color picker is larger than the pickers at the side. (Press spacebar) Will consider making it scalable.

>is there a brush stroke smooth option?
We are cubic interpolated by default. If you need more smoothing, there’s an icon for it on the context strip accross the top for that tool.

>I open the Browse Media window, and pin it. I close Howler. When I start Howler the Browse Media window is gone

The thumbtack on the media browser appears to have a bug. Animation dialogs were not designed to be tacked since they are only around when an animation is initialized.

>I add the animation controls I cannot float those? Or move them to the bottom of the screen?
Yes you can move it to the bottom with the icon on the left.

Here’s a quick video about working with the GUI.

Dan, I love PD pro and use it all the time. I will definitely check out this Project Howler.

Hey Dan. I just upgraded to version 9.5. Feeling very excited!