Creater Dan Ritchie talks about Project Dogwaffle
Project Dogwaffle, as it was code-named has been a labor of love since the beginning. I made the program available for free and it quickly gained a loyal following and continues to do so as a commercial product. The name was a reference to that first waffle out of the iron – the dog's waffle. The program has of course grown into a robust tool for digital artists, painters and traditional animators, with features like natural media, animated brushes, onion skin, exposure sheet, real-time animation playback, and a powerful keyframable timeline.

In the latest release, I wanted to expand the program's usefulness in

the video fields by adding built in support for interlaced formats, while taking the existing toolset to a new level of functionality. There's also a new tool for scanning animation frames from a twain source. I'm committed to making this one of the most powerful bitmap based tools for drawn animation out there.

The outstanding capability of the program is in its brushes. Brushes are not just static, grayscale stamps. They're living, breathing and moving, full color entities with a life all their own. You can pick up any part of your image or even an animation and paint with it. You can modify the hue, scale or rotation of a tree to paint an entire forest, or work with a huge assortment of existing traditional media and even make your own.

It's also completely possible to apply keyframed special effect filters to an animated brush, just like you would apply effects in a video editing program. Particle brushes for realistic foliage and bristle brush simulations are just a few more tools at your disposal, and of course there's full tablet support.