Sundial

Joe Clay | Mar 29, 2018

Where's Sundial? It's said "Coming Soon" for as long as this site has existed.

Fair enough. I've had a few inquiries into this one. The short of it is that it's now available as a name your own price with some caveats. The long of it is that it's incomplete and macOS only.

Boring History Lesson

I developed Sundial in 2014. One of my goals was to make a plugin. I originally tried to remake Pete's Plugins from his source, especially for his legendary halftone effect, but I could never figure out how it all went together. So I went about building my own from scratch.

I had this great idea. Everyone was trying to make long shadows and had developed all of these different hacks. For quick things, I had always cheated by stacking a few drop shadows. But I figured that I could probably turn that process into a way more efficient plugin. How hard can copying a layer over and over a ton of times be? It was difficult. The docs were ancient and my C++ experience is still low. But eventually I got it working. I even optimized it so that it didn't draw a ton of layers, but grouped them and repeated those groups to get to the desired length.

The only setback I faced, and could never recover from, was that it wouldn't work well with raster images. Every once in a while you'd need to purge. And moving the controls around usually seemed to have the effect of stacking the copies, especially if opacity was used.

So I stopped development completely when an alternative hit the market. I found out recently that others had been working on a similar path and had similar setbacks. I think the code they worked on ended up in a viable version somewhere.

So that's where it stands. As I use Macs, it's macOS only. Had I been able to get the kinks worked out, I probably would have ported it to Windows, but that didn't happen. If those two drawbacks aren't a concern feel free to name a price and download it. But please remember, there is no active development on this one, and it's offered as-is with no support available.