Don’t be put off by the name (Project Dogwaffle), Tom Arah discovers some extraordinary painting power in the unlikeliest of places

After working in the digital design industry for almost 20 years and reviewing over 250 applications I like to think that I know the graphics software that is out there. Recently however...

I received an email asking me to take a look at three applications that I had never heard of: PD Particles, PD Artist and PD Pro. Based on their bargain-basement prices, my expectations weren’t high and, after visiting their hosting website (www.thebest3d.com), which seems almost as interested in selling a novel about squirrels, they were lower still. Within seconds of opening PD Particles, however, my eyes had been opened. And my jaw had dropped.

PD Particles

The PD Particles interface could hardly be simpler. There are just five palettes available and really just one creative tool on offer – the Brush. There are also just two commands available from the buttonbar below the menus: an option to make your brush pressure-sensitive if you’re using a tablet and a dropdown menu of presets. The obvious thing to do is to select the first preset, WinterBranches, and begin. The result is extraordinary - as you drag your brush a dead tree complete with branches and sub branches springs to life (so to speak) on the canvas in front of you. Select from the other brushes in the Presets > Particles submenu and you can add various types of grass, tree, bush, weed, fern, sponge, coral, hair and so on along with numerous abstract patterns – and all with just a single stroke. The results are extraordinary and a joy to explore.

PD Particles offers a simple interface and some extraordinary particle-based brushes.

But what’s happening here - how does PD Particles create its amazing effects? After all, the only input you’re providing is the path of the brush and its speed. The answer provides an insight into how all computer-based brushes do their magic. Essentially the typical brush works by laying down a sequence of circular dabs along the path that you describe – pack them in closely enough and all you see is a smooth line; drag faster and you can often see the individual dabs open up. What PD Particles does is to treat this path and speed information as its jumping-off point, splitting off new paths at specified angles that have a certain lifespan and can be affected by gravity, velocity, drag and so on – and which themselves can spawn new paths. Open up the Particles palette and you can fine-tune all these parameters to produce subtle or radical variations in seconds.

PD Particles also offers plenty of more traditional painting functionality

By far the most important parameter is colour. In particular the ability to vary colour over the length of each path and subpath using gradients is key to their believability and impact. Each preset comes with its own range of eight, easily selectable gradients which again can subtly or dramatically change the end effect. You can also quickly mix in black or the current foreground colour with the Particles palette’s Shading and Tint options.
Alternatively, using the dedicated Gradient palette, you can edit the gradient as a whole. Again this shows PD Particles’ out-of-the-box thinking as, while most applications depend on laboriously setting colour stops, here you can simply drag swatches onto the ruler or drag on the red, green and blue component curves to interactively change the gradient as a whole. Even more impressive, with the Opacity tab you can quickly vary transparency to create semi-transparent effects, for example to produce realistic fur, or to create breaks in the stroke.
The creative potential of particle-based strokes is extraordinary whether you want to quickly create believable vegetation to use in a 3D application, an abstract background for a business presentation, or a striking work of art. But of course particle brushes can’t - and aren’t intended to - replace the traditional brush where the circular dabs all slavishly follow the input path. These straightforward brushes are child’s play to PD Particles and enable it to offer a few twists along the way. In particular, using the Brush Settings palette, you can change size, opacity and step (the spacing between dabs) and add in some random positional, size, angle, hue, saturation and brightness changes. In addition you can manage Bleed, which causes your paint colour to blend with the colours already onscreen, and Dryout which causes the paint dabs to fade out as if the brush has run out of pigment.
Bleed and Dryout are particularly important for creating artistic effects and are put to good use in PD Particles’ various traditional media presets. These also take advantage of another crucial artistic feature – the ability to break away from the completely smooth lines produced with circular dabs. That’s where the Brush Images palette comes in, displaying a list of different grayscale bitmaps that can be used as the dabs of paint that the brush lays down. You can even set the particle-based brushes to use these bitmap images, which instantly enables a whole new range of striking creative effects. And using the last of PD Particles’ five palettes, Paper, you can choose a tiling bitmap texture to be expressed in the stroke as 3D canvas grain – either as filled recesses for wet media or unfilled for dry.
PD Particles has a final trick up its sleeve that combines both of its major strengths: the recreation of traditional artistic media and its state-of-the-art particle-based handling. Using the dedicated Bristles tab of the Particles palette you can create a brush made up of up to 9999 particles with each separate particle/bristle following the path of the brush to contribute its own single pixel-wide line. With controls for colour bleed and mixing this can produce realistic traditional bristled brush effects or, by increasing the radius and so spreading the bristles more widely, you can create shading, cross-hatching and abstract effects with just a few strokes of your brush.

Particles can also be used to create bristled brushes

It’s important not to get carried away - PD Particles has some clear limitations. Most obviously, it only really has one creative tool, the Brush, and for some reason its range of Brush Images are restricted to a maximum width of just 35 pixels. In addition: the number of undos is limited; there are no layer capabilities; and you are restricted to a single open file. These are irritating separately but are worse together because they make it difficult to safely explore the creative options available - and PD Particles offers so many of them.
On the other hand, the lack of a safety net encourages going with the creative flow and PD Particles does offer an immediate, hands-on creative experimentation feature with yet another brilliant innovation – the ability to repeat the last stroke using the Shift+A keyboard shortcut. This can quickly make a stroke bolder or you can change your brush’s width, colour, bitmap image or any other parameter, even choose an entirely new preset, before reapplying. Now why can’t Photoshop do that?

PD Artist

PD Particles provides some extraordinary brush-based power for its lowly $29 asking price – so how does its (slightly) more expensive sibling, PD Artist, compare? After the intuitive simplicity of PD Particles, I have to say that first impressions were disappointing. To begin with, the two most impressive features - the Particles palette and the quick buttonbar access to the range of brush presets – are missing. With a bit of searching though I discovered that you can right-click on the Brush tool icon to call up presets and, although these don’t include particle brushes, if you call up the (dreadfully named) Optipustics palette this lets you load and control both particle and bristle brushes. It’s nowhere near as accessible but, with a bit of digging, you’ll find around 90% of the power in PD Particles is here. So what more do you get for your extra $10?
After a lot more digging, the answer is: a great deal. Firstly, PD Artist offers a much wider range of tools including a full set of selection tools, a Paintbucket tool for flood filling, a tool for applying linear and radial gradients and - another excellent innovation - tools for using the current brush to draw straight lines, smooth curves, rectangles and ovals. In addition there are no less than 80 filters available ranging from instant colour adjustments through to artistic effects including some real standouts such as the Wireframe Designer and Brush Strokes filters. You can even turn your static image into an animation as a sequence of bitmap frames and preview it onscreen.
Again though it’s with its innovative brush handling that PD Artist truly shines. Firstly, there’s a new Custom tab on the Brush Settings palette where you can create your own circular brush dab right up to 200 pixels wide. In addition you can interactively control the dab’s grayscale drop-off to create smooth airbrush style effects and change cell size and density to break up the smoothness to create clumpy, bristled effects. Alternatively, for complete control of your brush head, PD Artist lets you quickly create your own simply by dragging over a rectangular selection of the canvas with the Custom Brush Selector tool. The resulting brush can apply the colour present in the original selection or this can be treated as a matte that applies the current foreground colour. You can also save and reload the brush heads that you create.

PD Artist introduces the ability to create custom brushes and buffer handling

This is serious creative power but it wouldn’t be much use if every custom brush head was clearly rectangular so PD Artist automatically drops out any white in the background. This is fine if you have a blank white area of the canvas to draw on, but what if you don’t? Again it took some searching to find, but if you right-click on the Custom Brush Selector tool a dedicated Keying dialog appears in which you can select any colour to drop out and control the surrounding clipping – this is extremely powerful and again lets you subtly or radically alter your brush on-the-fly.
But what if you don’t have any solid area of canvas to create your brush on? This is where another PD Artist innovation comes into its own – the Buffer. This starts off life as a simple blank canvas the same size as the main image. Hit the Swap Buffer command (shortcut “j”) and your image disappears and the buffer appears on which you can quickly create your brush, try it out, then swap back again to use it for real.
That’s just the beginning. You can also copy the current image to the buffer (shortcut “J”) to store a snapshot that you can return to – you can even temporarily store multiple buffers as you work. Or you can switch on Swap Mixing and choose a blend mode and the main image and buffer will combine onscreen so that you can try out creative effects before deciding whether to merge or not. You can also choose from a wide range of buffer-based filters for combining, compositing, displacing and embossing the current image. I’m still getting used to the whole concept of the buffer, and it’s certainly not a complete replacement for Photoshop-style features such as multiple open images, history states and layers, but it clearly offers much of these features’ capabilities along with some unique ones of its own and a more direct hands-on creative approach.

PD Pro

Overall PD Artist doesn’t have the immediate impact or intuitive simplicity of PD Particles but, if you’re prepared to work at it, there’s no doubt that the program is well worth the extra $10 – many times over. So what about the final and most powerful option – PD Pro ($119)? In terms of the interface it proves a mixed blessing with the return of the buttonbar with its easily accessible presets and now quick control over the size, opacity and spacing of the current brush. On the other hand, there’s no central tabbed Brush Settings and Particles panel docked down the right of the screen; instead there are no less than 18 separate and idiosyncratic floating panels which, with no options for storing layouts or docking or grouping, inevitably means that the palette you are interested in is obscured by others. This is a program crying out for a rationalization and simplification.
On the positive side, you again gain a lot more power. This time there aren’t any new tools but there are plenty more filters – over 140 – and the buffer capability has been extended with support for multiple layers (though don’t expect these to act as they do in Photoshop). The biggest changes are to the animation features which are far more comprehensive and seriously useful. In particular there are options for onion skinning, handling exposure sheets, time shifting and for saving and loading AVI video files not just image sequences. Most impressive is the Timeline window which lets you apply a range of filters – including buffer-based compositing options - to all the frames in the animation and also keyframe property changes.
Animators and video artists should be fighting to get their hands on PD Pro but again what stands out for me are the improvements and innovations when it comes to brush handling. To begin with, there are a number of significant tweaks to existing features starting with the 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. You can also now load new brush image sets based on folders of images though sadly these are still limited to 35 x 35 pixels. Compensating for this is the ability to apply all the variations in hue, saturation, brightness, angle and, most importantly, size to the custom brushes you create yourself as well as to the in-built 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 that are applied after the stroke is finished. There’s also a new Brush FX palette that lets you create Nova brushes that produce star and halo effects. These will occasionally prove very handy, particularly for creating realistic night skies, but the new Brush Manager capability will regularly earn its keep. Using the new Store / Manage Brush command you can open a new palette for every custom brush that you want to keep to hand. More importantly, the Brush Manager lets you quickly change the size, rotation, hue, saturation, brightness and red, green and blue levels of your brush on-the-fly.

PD Pro’s power is undeniable – but seriously intimidating

Even more powerful is the Add Frame command at the bottom of the Brush Manager. Click on this and your brush variation is stored and the dab that the brush lays down now cycles between all saved frames - you’ve created what PD Pro calls an “animated brush”. Crucially, you aren’t limited to variations on the current custom brush – create an entirely new one and you can add this as a frame too. Or if you create a frame-based animation, say of a man walking, you can automatically create an animated brush out of it by Alt+dragging with the Custom Brush Selector tool. You can then recreate the effect across frames in a new animation with the Stroke Player command. Or 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 some extraordinary power, especially at the price - and it would be amazing if it had simply appeared out of the blue as I first thought. But it hasn’t. While the cut-down PD Particles and PD Artist are in their first release, PD Pro is now in its fourth and first appeared almost ten years ago. At this point I better own up and make an admission - and an apology. Over the years a number of you have recommended I take a look PD Pro and, on your prompting, I did – but quickly dismissed it. Clearly you were right and I was wrong.
So why did I dismiss it back then but rate it so highly now? Firstly, jumping in at the deep end with PD Pro’s radically different creative approach and interface is seriously intimidating – it was really only by working up through PD Particles and PD Artist that I came to appreciate just what the program could do and how. If I’m honest though the real reason largely came down to snobbery. At the time that I looked at it PD Pro was a freeware application with plenty of rough edges and bugs (incidentally the freeware version 1.2 is still available). More to the point it was called “Project Dogwaffle”, a title so awful that I’m still embarrassed to mention it.
It’s such a wilfully appalling name that it almost seems calculated to warn off potential users and indeed that’s not far from the truth. When I recently asked the developers “why Project Dogwaffle?”, I was told that the name was invented by Dan Richie – the program’s Canadian programmer and author of the Silver Squirrel books – based on his first unsuccessful attempts at cooking which were only fit for the dog! Thankfully, while PD Particles, Artist and Pro retain plenty of idiosyncracies, the odd rough edge and the same original left-field approach, Project Dogwaffle has now matured considerably and is most definitely fit for human consumption. Enjoy.