PD Artist (PD Howler’s smaller brother) is a highly sophisticated tool that will help you create the most stunning landscapes using creative visual effects worthy of a sci-fi or fantasy movie. Though it lacks the animation tools available in PD Howler, this professional graphics tool comes with all the brushes, effects, filters, and transformations you can think of to produce unbelievable works of art from one or more static images.
It all starts with an image, or a combination of up to three images. You can load your favorite photographs, paint a new image in the program’s canvas, or an image coming from another 3D tool. Either way, PD Artist will provide you with tools and filters capable of creating fantastic landscapes complete with mountains, valleys, rivers, foggy horizons, and realistic lights and shadows. The program’s many brushes and effects (many of them imported from PD Particles) will allow you to turn an image full of dots, grids, or other patterns into endless fictitious landscapes in 3D.
PD Artist works with the luminosity of the pixels in the source images selected. The brighter they are, the higher they will rise in your landscape. Darker ones will turn into dark valleys and canyons, to which you can then add a plethora of filters and transformations (blur, sharpen, good old photographic filters (remember Cokin filters?), noise, cleanup, spherize, etc.) to add that personal touch and atmosphere to your newly-created landscapes. Listing all of them would be useless, and besides it’s much more fun when you try them yourself and gasp at what they can do for your images. To top it all off, you can use the above-mentioned PD Particles and other brushes to apply that glossy or watercolor touch – among many many others – to your creation. Whenever you are happy with the result, frame it using the program’s framing tool.
I wouldn’t say that PD Artist is a difficult-to-use painting tool, but its extensive list of brushes, filters, and effects, together with the high level of customization that you can apply to all of them, require some time and practice to master. Thus, my advice to new users is to read the instructions carefully and turn to the Tutorials page in the developer’s website first to explore all the possibilities. They are, indeed, limitless.
PD Artist is a digital painting tool for digital artists so many with filters and tools that you’ll find it hard to believe they ever existed. Unleash your creativity and see how PD Artist can transform dull static textures into wavy or dramatic landscapes in just a few clicks.
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