• A Welcome by the Author of PD, Dan Ritchie

Hello, my name is Dan Ritchie, I'm the author of Project Dogwaffle. I've been a professional animator and I've used some great 3D animation programs. I also have used and seen some popular and well established image manipulation tools. However, I sometimes find limitations or difficulties when using those other paint and imaging tools. I couldn't always do the stuff I wanted the way I wanted when creating the perfect backdrops for my animations, or the steel plates for my spaceships, or the rugged dinosaur skins and other textures. I also needed foliage effects, particle systems, skies and atmospherics, light effects such as lens flares and halos and much more.

And, quite frankly, I couldn't afford to buy all these additional plugins and updates.

I thought there had to be a better way. Like they say: if you want it done right, you've got to do it yourself. 

So I created Project Dogwaffle. I also have used it in the making of Silver Squirrel, a novel about squirrels and life.

Is this the only program I have made? No, in fact I have been mentioned in the Lightwave 3D community for making great plugins. And some of these plugins were also merged into Dogwaffle. As you can see, this is a tool I made for myself and perhaps you too will be able to benefit from it. I sure hope so. The bare necessities of life are expensive enough these days, it shouldn't be prohibitively expensive to just dabble with painting and drawing.

 I hope you'll be able to find some happiness in the art you make with the help of Dogwaffle.  Don't be shy to share it with the rest of the Dogwaffler communities.

My mission in life? Good question. Things change, life can be quite a challenge -  www.squirreldome.com

Why call it Project Dogwaffle?  because dogs like waffles.  No, seriously now, there's more to it, but why spoil a little secret :-)

•   So What is Project Dogwaffle?

It is a Paint Program. Not another Photo editing program. Not really just an imaging tool. Not an image conversion tool, although it can serve that purose too. The primary reason for Dogwaffle is for you to paint - without the mess, the occasional spills or the funny fumes.  Additionally, there's an SDK so if you're a programmer and are interested in making more filters and plugins this will get you started. Much of Dogwaffle's functionality is in fact accessible through plugins. They are highly optimized for speed, and many of them operate in realtime.

•  Is it Really free?

Yes, some versions are free. Version 1.2 is available for free download. Version 1.15 was the first commercial release, and came out mid 2002.  Late Fall 2002 we had v1.5, the first release with support of pressure-sensitive input from tablets. The latest is version 4.1 (as of Fall 2007),  It is much faster than the prior versions. You can get an idea of the progression of versions and new features added with each subsequent release here at "what's new?".
   

• Is there more?

You bet. Version 1.15 was the first commercial release in mid 2002, and since then another release 1.5 came out late 2002. Version 1.6 was first targetted as a performance enhancement version released for sometime in Spring/Summer 2003.  There were several releases of 2.x, then 3.x and now 4.0, with the 4.1 atch being the latest.

• Where to Learn more about Project Dogwaffle?

• http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle

Here you can find out more about what else to do with Dogwaffle. 

- What's new  ?
- activities and projects, tutorials...
- Freebies such as Wallpapers, animated brushes
- the DOTM (Dogwaffler of the Moment) - a gallery of artists
- purchase the most recent commercial versions

•  http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/dogwaffle

This is our official Dogwaffle discussion forum. If there's any announcements, this is where you'll find them.

- patches 
- brushes 
- teaser images 
- art 

and a great community of dogwafflers from many continents and countries who share a common passion for the visual arts.

• More About Dogwaffle - a historical Backgrounder

     Why another paint program?  Dogwaffle has it's roots in the need to tell a story -- a story about squirrels:

     To put it in historical context, Silver Squirrel started in 1992, roughly the hay-day of the Amiga personal computer.  I was living in the loft of a cypress home in Florida at the time, winding up a short animated film called Billy Meets Pumpkin Head.  Every day, the squirrels would visit me at my window, rolling their acorns down the incline of the roof, when it occurred to me they would be neat for my next short.  I decided on a name shortly  after - Silver Squirrel

     In 1993, I did 2 minutes of 2d animation while concurrently working on the story.

     I soon went to work at a game company, Gorilla System where I first seriously started working in 3d.  I still wanted to do the short, but the story was rapidly growing into a novel, and the Amiga platform that my work depended on was seeing hard times.  It was a fluke that I decided to write my own paint program to carry on the style of work I did.  Some airbrushing code I had written on the Amiga was ported over to VB4 on the PC and with an extra weekend of work, Dogwaffle was born.  It remained an "in-house" tool for some time, meaning my house. It was when I went to work at Foundation Imaging on series television that I decided that it might be better to do Silver in 3d. 

     Unfortunately at the time, the technology was not up to the task.  I spent the time learning and developing methods to do hair (the motion blur hair trick), Dynamics (Parenting goals with time offset to a skeleton -- I called it the Amazing Bunny Ear Trick), and ways to do foliage ( http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/whatsnew/1_6/optipustics/index.html ).

     Unfortunately all of these gags had some problems but at least they went in my bag of tricks.  Eventually Sasquach and other hair plugins came out and I saw some hope to do the 3d stuff, so I built a Squirrel model in 3D.

     I also had the opportunity to work on some other challenging problems.  Birds can be quite an enigma. Since then I had the chance to study my own bird -- Battle Bird.

     I realized of course that I couldn't do all the work myself.  I had written a proposal for a series of over 40 episodes by now.  I decided it would be best to move the project along the only way I could.  I decided to finish the novel, which took me several years. Now, 10+ years have passed and all I can say is that I think the ludicrous amount of time I've spent on this project will be worth it.

      Of course I still work on Dogwaffle, as it has become an invaluable tool in its own right, and I still enjoy playing in 2d as much as ever.  What's not to like?

     Thanks for reading to the end, and now go have some fun painting - in other words, just dog it!

            -Dan