Special Thanks to Claus 

for Supporting me in all of this! He just got Rosie her new dForce Wet Style Curly Hair, by Linday from Daz 3d! So the first try with this incredible product is simulating as I type this.

The product page warns of system intensity and long dForce simulation times, yet this first simulation is cruising along just a tad faster that her usual Classic Long and Curly Hair with dForce, also by Linday.

This is a Huge Win, for I am more than happy to wait for the hair getting the excellent results I have been - especially since it's so wonderful to work with - given all the helpful morphs, shaders, initial shape poses and simulation settings the products come with.

This one doesn't come with all of the extensive tutorials and documentation of the Classic Long and Curly hair, so if you want help with this sort of hair, I'd suggest starting with that product. The explanations and tips are So Good!!!

Update: This dForce Wet Style Curly Hair is Awesome! Just load, apply settings, Simulate. Withoug doing any 'simulation magic' with helpers or anything like that, it just works - and it looks wet and heavy (from being wet) in the simulations. Fantastic!

...continued on the Appreciation Page

Some friends of mine are conducting a PD Howler course at the time of this writing, and I'm in the class. What a Blast!!!

Tiffanie conducted the first two weeks, which we've just finished. Philip will take over for the remaining two weeks. What a great way to do it. Both of them use Howler in entirely different ways and both are excellent at teaching the software. 

I actually look forward to getting homework, doing it, and then doing a bunch more stuff. 

We didn't even get to the animation part yet, but I couldn't resist. Tiffanie has a way of teaching me new features and tools that get me excited to add to my workflow - which is usually doing visual effects on my animations.

Let it Snow!

Philip took us on a journey through many of the incredible animation and 3D capabilities of PD Howler 2023, and gave us a glimpse of the soon to be released PD Howler 2024.

He showed some really cool techniques for adding falling snow to an animation along with animating filters and filters that are designed specifically for animations. PD Howler is packed with both options, plus a timeline editor with nearly every filter available, my pal - the Brush Keyframer, 3D Designer, PuppyRay render engine, and a whole lot more.

This little short was a lot of fun to create - all compositing and effects are done in Project Dogwaffle Howler 2023. The editing and titling was done, this time, using Corel's wonderful VideoStudio Pro, which also automated the music per my selections to the length of the project. Really cool! VideoStudio Pro also has a really nice separate Screen Capture app that I use for my tutorials and demonstrations.

A new video of incomplete scenes and test renders. This is getting to be a lot of fun to do!

Right when I was really getting going in Daz Studio with animations, I visited the forums where I saw that somebody asked if they cool use Daz Studio for making animations and the only answers that came up were saying "No, better to export to Blender", "No, export to Unreal"... that sort of thing. 

I couldn't believe that this was the only sort of message left for the original poster to try and digest - or simply turn away knowing that animation is not possible in Studio!

So I switched gears for a bit and made up a bunch of scenes to go with the character renders I was doing at the time - and having a blast with, and brought it all into DaVinci Resolve and composited everything together using Fusion within. That's a Cyberpunk video below.