Transparent Layers for Digital Painting

[Legend]

I have PD Howler 9, last time I check there was not going to be any additions to having transparent layers like they do in: Photoshop, Gimp,MyPaint,Corel Painter,After Effect, PaintToolSai,Adobe Premimer and Krita just to name a few. is this going to be a feature in this edition, I am a digital painter more than I am a FX artist right now. I loved PD Hower 9 for its really unique brushes and features. I would probably buy version 10 only if there have the option for multiple transparent layers.

[muddpuddle]

Sadly, this is the one thing that has always frustrated me about PD Howler/Artist. As much as I like some aspects of the software, it just doesn't fit into my workflow because of the lack of tranparent layers. I don't understand why the company doesn't want them or cannot do them...

[thebest3d]

it's not that we don't want them, it's that there is a lot of code to change to make it so. It is work in progress, major work, and may be ready for v11. We have a bunch of things that are needed to make it work. Some of the changes behind the scene that are in v10 are in fact in preparation for alpha blended layers. Just can't afford to stop everything for another 6 months.

[xyzt]

You know, thebest3d, I've been thinking that you should pin the 3 transparency tutorials in one post at the top of the discussion for days. Perhaps in both the version 10 and the version 9.6 discussions. That should make some people who are new to the program not as initially frustrated as they would be otherwise.

[thebest3d]

indeed.

[dwinblood]

I own PD Howler 9.6 and like it but I can tell you that single reason I don't use it that often is simply because I have to end up moving what I do it it over to Photoshop to do the transparency I am looking for. I assume some of it is likely doable but I haven't had to watch all of the tutorials. Tons I want to do, and not enough time. @southpawami mentioned tutorials specific to 9.6 for transparency. If you have a link to such a tutorial that is one I'd be interested in viewing I just haven't had time to try to wade through all the various tutorials yet. I did use PD Howler to make a lot of different cloud varieties that I would then bring ocer into Photoshop to make them transparent so I could actually use them for some dynamic weather. I'd like to not rely on Photoshop as much if possible.

[Legend]

Originally posted by southpawami:

You know, thebest3d, I've been thinking that you should pin the 3 transparency tutorials in one post at the top of the discussion for days. Perhaps in both the version 10 and the version 9.6 discussions. That should make some people who are new to the program not as initially frustrated as they would be otherwise.

this would be great if I knew how to get transparcy some kind of way in either 9 or 10 I would be consider buying the upgrade..

[thebest3d]

The how-to technique depends a lot on what is the nature of what should turn transparent.

If you painted a cloud, and the inside of the cloud is fully opaque, then I guess you want the outside of the cloud, the background sky, to turn transparent. If that's the case, you can often use the magic want to select the outside and then invert alpha. Now you have the cloud selcted, pick it up as custom brush, save that as PNG.

But there are times when the cloud has a partial transparency, i.e. it is not fully opaque.

I could perhaps think of specific tutorials if I saw what you painted.

[thebest3d]

One technique is to paint on alpha, to indicate which pixels are transparent or opaque. If it's easier to select the outside sky pixels, do that, and then invert the selection.

[dwinblood]

In my case what I did was really simple. I generated clouds and did some effects on them in PD Howler. I used hot pink and white as textures. I did this for Photoshop stage purposes. I then brought the images into Photoshop.... selected a range of hot pink colors.... deleted those so they were gone and all that was left was white areas or at least not as hot pink areas. I converted to grayscale so as to eliminate any remaining pink. I then used the slider for opacity and dropped it to between 60% and 70% so the clouds were partially see through. I saved the image as a PNG file. I loaded it into unity on a transparent shader. I slapped it onto a plane or a dome, and then I animated the clouds by adjusting the offsets over time with a script. I layered multiple such objects at different layers with different random starting offsets and slightly different speeds and it actually made pretty convincing clouds.


However, Ideally I would have been able to generate my cloud layer, set the opacity in PD Howler and be done with it and not have to do any Photoshop hoop jumping. This might be possible in PD Howler but I have no idea how to do it.

[thebest3d]

ok, I have a rough idea now. Quick question for clarification, when you say you 'generated clouds', do you mean you painted them with some brushes? Or used any filters or other tools?

Are the clouds in white and shades of grey?

If you could email me that png I'd have a clear idea.

You can convert the image in Howler to greyscale (Image > Greyscale (near bottom of menu) > for example Expose through lens.

You can copy that greyscale to Alpha channel in several ways. One is to copy from Main image to Swap image and then from Swap t Alpha (both from the Image menu:

Image > Copy to the swap image
and
Image > Alpha > Copy Swap image to Alpha

A more elegant way (IMHO) is:

1. Selection > Store selection (ignore that it doesn't have a selection yet to store)
2. in the stored alpha window: click Get Image. This grabs the current image into the stored instance. Shows as greyscale
3. in the stored alpha window: click Replace. This replaces the current alpha with the stored instance.

If you need to further adjust the selection such as to tighten it, or make it more transparent or more opaque, grow it, shrink it adjust its contrast etc... you can do so from the Selection menu.

the challenge is that along the borders of the clouds, with soft edges, you will see part of the pink coloring if the background was pink to begin with and you painted white on it for the clouds. You might find it looks better if it is against a black background or perhaps white, depending on how the cloud is going to be composited in the final scene.

You can probably also work wth something like this: start with blue background, paint the white clouds, then remove the blue channel, the cloud is now yellow (red and green channel), on black bg (blue removed). Convert to greyscale, make that the alpha channel as well as the RGB image.

That brings the question on how to isolate one of the R, G or B channels. I suppose there are several ways. One is by doing a SUBTRACT mode combination with blue. Another is to store the image and then clear the image to black and restore (add) each of the desired channels from the stored image (look for the little pulldown menu in the lower right corner of the stored imae... there's an option for RGB channels > Add red, add green etc... so you can erase the image to black and then add red, and green. You leave blue out that way.

I'll experiment with some more techniques. But essentially I think if what you want is for the cloud to be almost opaque with a slight level of transparency and the background around it to be fully transparent, yes you can do that.

Can you post an image of the cloud?

[dwinblood]

I don't have the image handy. I did this quite some time ago. I think you have answered my question as I didn't know WHERE some of those things were that you are mentioning. I hadn't even discovered the alpha channel in PD Howler. I was using one of the filters to render clouds and then using some other effects to stretch them an make them appear cirrus like, and yes ultimately I was using shades of gray so grayscale would work. The clouds I made in PD Howler looked way better than the ones I tried to make in Photoshop, so I definitely did see it's power. It was all the fact I couldn't determine how to manipulate the alpha channel in PD Howler that threw me off. I only chimed in here because in reading what other people were saying it sounded like this could be something that was confusing other people. I simply didn't see a way to set the alpha/transparency within PD Howler. The one thing is all I needed to not even need Photoshop for this particular experiment.

[thebest3d]

excellent, happy to help. I think I will experiment a little and make some more tutes on making clouds.

One of the tools (Filters) to make clouds is the Particle Modeler in the Animated filters category.
Maybe that's what you used?

[thebest3d]

There's also the Render > Sky filter

[xyzt]

Originally posted by Legend:

Originally posted by southpawami:

You know, thebest3d, I've been thinking that you should pin the 3 transparency tutorials in one post at the top of the discussion for days. Perhaps in both the version 10 and the version 9.6 discussions. That should make some people who are new to the program not as initially frustrated as they would be otherwise.

this would be great if I knew how to get transparcy some kind of way in either 9 or 10 I would be consider buying the upgrade..

View > Other > Alpha panel...

Well, so I don't remember if this is in 9.6, but it's in 10 because I was just using it. It's kind of like the big menu of Alpha tools for everyone who doesn't remember any of the elegant ways to use floating alpha. I don't know if there is a keyboard shortcut for this menu, but if there isn't one then I hope one will come soon.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

Originally posted by thebest3d:

it's not that we don't want them, it's that there is a lot of code to change to make it so. It is work in progress, major work, and may be ready for v11. We have a bunch of things that are needed to make it work. Some of the changes behind the scene that are in v10 are in fact in preparation for alpha blended layers. Just can't afford to stop everything for another 6 months.

Hi, I've been scratching my head porting in a painting (started in Howler / edited with GIMP) - even though I made the background transparent in GIMP (so that I have an adjustable asset for vector proggies like DrawPlus) Howler forces a black background on import - does this have to do with what the OP is asking?