Project Howler’s Artist 2023 edition is now available. This is the budget $28 edition of Howler, which can also often be had at a discounted price. Currently it’s $17, and is worth considering as a budget landscape painting software, not least because it integrates 3D features.
I summarized the new 2023 features here. The current version is for Windows 10 and 11 only. Other Windows users need PD Howler 2021.3 build 85 (i.e. prior to January 2021).
DALL.E has launched in beta, and it’s commercial. It’s not immediately certain if this is DALL.E or DALL.E 2, but a tiny button on the page reveals it to be the 2 version that there has been all the buzz about.
$15 will buy you enough processing power to create around 460 images, though beta testers will also get some free. DALL.E 2 makes four pictures per prompt, so somewhere around three or four per day. Seems fair.
Even fairer is that, in return for the $15 per month… “users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create”. Presumably users will also get guidance on how best to tag their images, to prevent them being mistaken for real-world pictures. The tag “ai-gen” is easy to remember and type, I’d suggest.
Actually, the law seems to indicate that there is no need to grant the rights, as AI’s that make images have no rights to grant. That perhaps poses a thorny problem down the road for users. Can people then take a commercial artist’s AI-developed/derived (‘ai-dev’) creations and run with them? There will have to be some way to prove in court the extent to which the ‘ai-gen’ original and the sold version differ, and the level of human artistry involved. With digital images, that could be very tricky to prove.
Note also that… “Artists who are in need of financial assistance will be able to apply for subsidized access.”
Text2LIVE: Text-Driven Layered Image and Video Editing. A text description typed by a human prompts an AI to modify only a part of a real-world picture. Perhaps we need a name for this? How about ‘modifiction’?
Those using the Poser 12 software for its unique real-time comics, sketch and line-art features will want to know about the new P12 free scripts directory page, collecting and organising links to free Python scripts that work in Poser 12. Poser 12 has moved to using Python 3 for scripting, so older scripts will likely not work.
Easy Toolbox ZBrush Plugin speeds up your workflow by…
“gathering together, in a single interface, many of the most useful functions of ZBrush that you use all the time.”
Looks very useful, and is currently only $3.50 on the ArtStation Marketplace. I’m amazed that ZBrush doesn’t already have this feature built-in, but I guess it doesn’t.
Having the same for Blender might make me want to try it at last, especially if you can pin to the Toolbox some form of automation to handle all those insanely fiddly multi-step cross-panel procedures that I occasional see on tutorials. And which make me shake my head in disbelief. Who can remember even half of such a 25-step procedure, which is perversely often needed to do a fairly simple thing? Let alone then remember 30 such procedures, along with all their keyboard shortcuts?
Generative isometric structures and tentacular beasties, with live tweakable code. Sadly G’MIC’s Light & Shadows | Illuminate 2D Shape did absolutely nothing in terms of adding greyscale shading to lineart. It appears the target needs to be rendered in grey + lines to start with, then that gets shaded?
2D digital art and painting 
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