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Paint magic

Posted on 8 Mar 2007 at 11:53

Tom Arah discovers some breathtaking and revolutionary painting power in the most unlikely of places.

Animators and video artists ought to be fighting to get their hands on PD Pro, but again what stood out for me were the improvements and innovations in brush handling. There are several significant tweaks to existing features, starting with restoration of the full power of the particle-based system that was cut back in PD Artist, and the addition of a new range of colour pickers, including Red Yellow Blue and paint-based mixers for traditional artists. In PD Pro, you can load new brush image sets from external folders of images, although sadly, they're still limited to 35 x 35 pixels. Compensating for this limit, you can apply all the variations in hue, saturation, brightness, angle and, most importantly, size to custom brushes you've created yourself, as well as the built-in brushes. And PD Pro 4 offers some completely new brush power.

The new PostFX tab on the Brush Settings palette lets you apply embossing, shadowing and watercolour effects after a stroke is finished, and there's a new Brush FX palette that lets you create Nova brushes to produce star and halo effects. These effects can occasionally prove very handy, particularly when painting realistic night skies, but the new Brush Manager capability will earn its keep all the time - using the new Store/Manage Brush command, you can open a new palette for every custom brush you want to keep at hand, and the Brush Manager also lets you quickly change the size, rotation, hue, saturation, brightness and red, green and blue levels of your brush on-the-fly.

More powerful still is the Add Frame command at the bottom of the Brush Manager. Click on this and your current brush variation gets stored, then the dab it lays down will cycle between all the saved variations - you've created what PD Pro calls an "animated brush". You're not restricted to variations on the current custom brush either - create an entirely new one and you can add this as a frame too. Create a frame-based animation, say, of a man walking and you can automatically create an animated brush from it by holding down Alt while dragging with the Custom Brush Selector tool. You can then recreate the effect across frames in a new animation with the Stroke Player command, animate the character walking across the screen using the dedicated Brush Keyframer, or apply a keyframed filter to the brush itself using the Timeline.

All in all, PD Pro offers a stunning amount of power - especially at the price - and it would be amazing if such a program had simply appeared out of the blue, as I first believed. But it hasn't. While the cut-down PD Particles and PD Artist are both in their first releases, PD Pro is now in its fourth incarnation and first appeared almost ten years ago. At which point I'd better own up and apologise, because over the years a number of you have recommended that I take a look PD Pro and indeed I did but quickly dismissed it. Clearly, you were right and I was wrong.

So why did I dismiss it back then when I rate it so highly now? First of all, to jump in at the deep end of PD Pro's radically different creative approach and interface is seriously intimidating, and it was really only by working my way up via PD Particles and PD Artist that I came to appreciate just what it could do. And if I'm honest, there was an element of snobbery there too - at that time, PD Pro was freeware with lots of rough edges and bugs (incidentally, a freeware version 1.2 is still available), and more to the point it was called Project Dogwaffle, a name so truly awful it still brings up goose-pimples to write it in a magazine aimed at professionals. It's such a wilfully appalling name, it feels almost calculated to warn away potential users, which is indeed not too far from the truth. When I recently asked the developers "why Project Dogwaffle?" I was told the name was invented by Dan Ritchie, Dogwaffle's programmer and author of the Silver Squirrel books, based on his first unsuccessful attempts at cooking, which were only fit for the dog!