A fantastic graphics package for
DOS published by
Electronic Arts, based around
DeluxePaint 2 Enhanced but with several key differences :
Frames : DPA used the same 'cels' model as Autodesk Animator. It was possible to create brushes with multiple frames (animbrushes)and then paint them into an animation (e.g., to create the effect of walking) by holding down the ALT key.
Transformation : You could create animations using the 3D transformation feature of DeluxePaint, allowing for rolling landscapes, scaling and rotating of brushes, etc. You could even use antialiasing.
Morphing : It was possible to morph between two brushes, however this was very crude and did not allow the setting of keypoints for example.
DPA was limited to 320x200x8bit thanks to the already tight memory constraints of DOS. With the nifty features above, and painting tools such as smoothing, shading and colorizing, it was pretty much the ultimate sprite creation tool. Many of the textures in Quake 1 & 2 were created in this program. Impressively, the entire intro to Space Hulk (with an amazing scene were dozens of tyranids burst through a wall) was created in this program (and synced up with .VOC sound samples).
It was possible to seamlessly string together animations and stills to create full "presentations" (or rather cartoons). I prefered DPA to Autodesk Animator because of its more logically arranged drawing tools (although Autodesk had the superior system of inks - the "smooth horizontally" ink would be a welcome addition to Photoshop, if anyone knows of a plugin - and onion skinning).
The first piece of software I ever sold was a DPA cartoon created by myself and my best friend when we were about 10 or 11.
I plan to extend this WU in future. Also, I will post some of my old anims (especially if I can cobble together a less fiddly way of converting .ANM files to other formats).