What it does
The panels with a slider or a sheet under them are live: drag them and they behave like the real tool. Everything else it does is listed at the bottom.
Retime by dragging
Every layer's keys and holds on one sheet. Drag a hold to stretch it, move a block to another row, and expose on ones, twos or threes. One click flips the sheet into an animatic of every cut.
A light table built in
Onion skin shows up to ten drawings each way, red behind and green ahead, on one layer or all of them. Lift a neighbor off the pegs to slide or turn it into place, then tap the peg bar to drop everything back. Nothing in the film moves. Scrub the slider to see the spacing.
Steady the line, then build the brush
Turn the stabilizer up and a long slow line comes out steady: it follows your hand and catches up to the pen when you stop. The shelf comes stocked, and the brush creator makes more: shape the tip, load a paper grain, set how the line answers pressure, speed and tilt, and share it as a .dbrush. Krita and SAI brushes import with the converter add‑on. Drag the slider.
Lines that stay lines
On a Linework layer every stroke stays a line you can still edit. Bend, smooth and taper it with the Node tool, trim an overshoot back to the nearest crossing, or draw over part of a line and the new pass replaces it. The fill follows when you bend it, and textured brushes keep their grain.
Two keys, and the drawings between
Draw two keys on a Linework layer and Tween to Next Key on the dope sheet draws the inbetweens, one a frame, each an ordinary drawing you can still fix. Change a key and they redraw to follow; draw on one and it becomes a key. Space Inbetweens sets the count and the ease, and Stroke Hints light up the line your next stroke will tween with.
Draw one side, get the rest
A symmetry guide on the cut mirrors every stroke left and right, or repeats it around the center up to 16 times, so a face, a wheel or a flower is drawn once. Drag the center and the line on the canvas to put it where the drawing needs it. Draw in the panel, then add lines.
Find the angle, then draw it
Import a .glb, .gltf or .obj and the model stands over the paper as lines to trace. Turn it to the angle the shot wants, move, size and roll it on its handles, and draw on top. It never shows up in an export. Drag the model: across turns it, up and down tips it.
Scenes and cuts in one file
A project holds scenes, and each scene holds cuts with their own timing, camera and length. Layers belong to the film, so line is the same layer in every cut. The Files card holds every sound, picture and drawing in the file; drag one onto the sheet and it goes in as a reference, so a held background is one drawing however many cuts use it.
Change one swatch, recolor the film
Paint on a cel layer remembers which swatch made it, so editing the swatch recolors every cut at once, and a swatch added later claims what's already drawn in its color. Painterly layers opt out and stay free RGBA. Save the palette as a .dpal for the next film. Drag the hue slider.
One project in, a finished film out
One .dga holds the whole project. Export a PNG sequence, GIF, APNG or H.264 MP4 with its sound, on paper or a transparent background, with nothing extra to install. The X‑sheet prints to PDF or goes out as XDTS. Images, sequences, GIFs, video to rotoscope, Krita files, wav and mp3 all come in. Record the screen or a timelapse of the drawing as you go.
● Animated GIF
○ Animated PNG
○ MP4 video (H.264)
Ink over paint, roughs under everything
Nine blend modes, per‑layer opacity, alpha lock, and clipping to the layer below. Folders fold away, and locking or hiding one covers everything inside. A Draft layer stays on the canvas and in the onion skin but never exports, which is where scans, roughs and model sheets go.
Move layers, not just the camera
Every layer has its own peg bar inside a cut. Move, turn or scale it on keys: drag the gizmo on the canvas or type the numbers, and the frames between ease from key to key. Pan a far background slower than the near one while the character walks on the spot, and you have a multiplane shot the camera alone can't do.
Joints, parents and swaps
Drag the cross to set the joint a layer turns about, and pick a layer for it to follow, so the hand rides the forearm and the forearm the arm. Swap a part for another drawing on the Motion card, a new mouth or a new hand. Save the rig as a file and place it again in the next shot. With the Rig Import add‑on a Toon Boom Harmony rig comes in as a guide to pose, and Make Layers takes it apart into layers to draw on.
Effects, previewed live
Blur, levels, mosaic, noise and smoothing, each shown on the canvas while you drag its sliders. Every layer also carries a color grade (lift, gamma, gain, saturation) that keys across a cut the way the camera does. Drop a plugin DLL in the folder and the Effects menu grows.
Sound under the sheet
Bring in wav or mp3 clips and each gets its own row under the sheet with its waveform drawn in. Drag to re‑cue in whole frames, trim either end, mute or balance them, and the MP4 carries the same mix. Turn on Scrub Audio and dragging the playhead plays the sound under it.
Your work survives a crash
Douga keeps a snapshot of the open project while you draw, and if it dies, the next launch offers the work back. A failed save asks whether to retry or save elsewhere. Saves and renders run in the background, so you keep drawing. A .dga is a zip inside, so even a damaged one opens as a folder.
Flip, undo and turn without the keyboard
Hold R and the drawings flip under your hand like paper, on every visible layer. Two fingers tap to undo, three to redo; pinch to zoom, twist to turn the paper, and it snaps level near zero. Flick the pen along a list to scroll it. Sticky Shift and Ctrl latch for a hand holding the tablet, and the padlock in the sheet header ignores a resting palm.
Everything that is in the program
What ships in the free download, which is all of it.
| drawing | |
|---|---|
| Tools | Brush, eraser, fill, line, shape, text and eyedropper, with marquee, lasso, magic wand, transform, hand, a guide tool, a motion tool that slides a layer along its peg bar, and Node and Redraw for linework. One key each, and holding a key borrows the tool until you let go. |
| Brushes | Pressure, tilt and speed shape the line, and the stabilizer takes the wobble out of a long slow one: the line follows the path your hand took, settles onto the pen tip when you pause, and ends where you lift. The brush creator builds new ones: tip shape, your own paper grain, how the line answers the pen, packed into a .dbrush to hand on. |
| Selection | Rectangular, freehand, or everything matching the color you click. Expand, contract and feather the result, then move, scale, rotate or flip what is inside it. |
| Reference picture | Any picture, in a card that floats over the canvas and never becomes part of the film. Pick one in the Files card and it saves with the project. Pan and zoom it on its own, and pick colors straight off it. View > See Through lets whatever is behind the window show through the paper to trace over. |
| Linework | A Linework layer keeps every stroke as a line you can still edit: bend, smooth and taper it with the Node tool, split, join and reorder strokes, trim an overshoot back to the nearest crossing, or draw over part of a line to replace it. Fills follow the line, textured brushes keep their grain, and Vectorize to Linework turns a pixel drawing into lines. |
| Fill a range | The Fill tool's Range switch fills every drawing from one frame to another as one undo, following a shape that moves, and on an empty color layer it makes a drawing for each line drawing it colors. |
| the paper | |
| Animation paper | A light table under every drawing: onion skin up to ten drawings each way, red behind and green ahead, fading with distance, on one layer or all of them. |
| Peg bar | Drag the bar to lay a neighboring drawing where the arc says it goes, then tap to drop the stack home. The inbetweener's gesture with paper, and the drawing itself is never edited. |
| Scanned paper | Trace to New Layer pulls the line off a scan or a photograph of paper. The drawn marks come through onto a new layer as ink and the paper behind them does not, so a pencil rough arrives as something you can paint under. Line color survives the trip: a drawing worked in red and blue the way animators mark shadow and highlight comes in with those passes still told apart, rather than flattened into one black line. |
| Guides | Perspective and grid guides per cut, with snap on or off and a switch for each at the bottom of the Tools card. A symmetry guide mirrors what you draw left and right, or repeats it around a center up to 16 times. A sheet frame at 16:9 HD, 3:2 layout, 4:3 TV or full field. |
| 3D model | Drop a .glb, .gltf or .obj on the window and the model stands over the paper as lines to trace. Drag it round with the Guide tool, move, size and roll it on its handles, and it never shows up in an export. |
| timing | |
| Dope sheet | Keys and holds for every layer on one sheet. Drag a hold to stretch it, move blocks between layers, insert or cut time, expose on ones, twos or threes, and bookmark frames on the ruler to jump between. |
| Scenes and cuts | Scenes gather cuts, and every cut keeps its own timing, camera and length. The layer stack belongs to the film rather than the cut, so a layer named once is that layer in every shot. |
| Files card | Every sound, picture and drawing the file holds, placed or not, in one place. Drop files in to add them and drag a row onto the sheet or the canvas. Put one on a frame and it goes as a reference rather than a copy, so a held background is one drawing however many cuts stand on it. |
| Camera | The export crop moves on its own keys, set, deleted and reset from the sheet. It moves the camera, not the artwork. |
| Motion | Every layer carries its own move inside a cut: translate, scale and rotate on keys of its own, eased between them and held either end. Drag the gizmo on the canvas to drop a key at the playhead, or type the five numbers. Two layers panning at different rates is a multiplane shoot, and one camera cannot spell it. Every drawing tool still lands under the pen on a moved layer. |
| Inbetweens | Tween to Next Key draws the inbetweens between two linework keys, one a frame, each an editable drawing. Change a key and they redraw to follow; draw on one and it becomes a key. Space Inbetweens picks the count and the ease, and Stroke Hints light up the line your next stroke will tween with. |
| Rigging | Set the joint a layer turns and scales about, make it follow another layer, and swap a part for another drawing. Save Rig keeps a rig as a file and Rigs places a saved one at the playhead. With the Rig Import add‑on a Toon Boom Harmony rig comes in as a guide to pose, and Make Layers takes it apart into layers. |
| Playback | Play and loop the cut, the scene, the whole film or a marked range, with audio scrubbing under the playhead. Frame rates 8, 12, 23.976, 24, 25 and 30. |
| picture | |
| Layers | Nine blend modes, per-layer opacity, alpha lock and clipping. Folders fold away, and a folder's lock, visibility or draft flag covers everything inside it. A draft layer stays on the canvas and out of every export. |
| Effects lane | Every layer carries one inside a cut, beside its exposure and its motion. Tone is the first word in it: a lift, gamma, gain and saturation grade, keyed and eased the way the camera and the motion track key theirs, so one key grades the whole cut and two grade across it. Smoothing takes the stair-steps off a binary pen line or a flat fill without blurring it. |
| Color | Pick on the wheel, read it as RGB or HSV, and keep it in a managed palette the project carries with it. Recent colors sit beside the wheel. |
| Palette-indexed paint | On a cel layer every pixel remembers which swatch made it, so editing that swatch recolors every linked mark across the whole film at once, and a new swatch claims the strokes already drawn in its color. A painterly layer opts out and stays free RGBA. The model travels to the next film as a .dpal. |
| sound | |
| Audio | Several wav or mp3 clips, each on its own row under the sheet with its waveform drawn along it. Re-cue in whole frames, trim either end, mute one against another, weigh the mix, and the mix you hear is the mix the MP4 carries out. |
| files | |
| Project | One .dga holds every scene, cut, layer and drawing. It is an ordinary zip inside, so even a damaged one opens as a folder. |
| Imports | Images, numbered sequences, animated GIF, video to rotoscope (MP4, MOV, M4V, AVI and WMV built in), Krita .kra with its layers and its animation, OpenToonz .tlv levels with their palettes, 3D models (glb, gltf, obj) to draw over, wav, mp3, XDTS timesheets, pose packs and color models. |
| Exports | PNG sequence, animated GIF, APNG, and H.264 MP4 with its mixed audio, all built in. The X-sheet prints to PDF or leaves as XDTS for a studio that wants the timing. Whole film or marked range, full size or scaled, on paper or a transparent background, with title cards at either end, and it renders while you keep drawing. |
| Recording | Record the Douga window or just the canvas to MP4 with the pointer, pausing the take as you go, or keep a timelapse of one frame per stroke beside the project and export it when the piece is done. |
| the machine | |
| Runs on | Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit, on Direct3D 11. A 3.4 MB download that unzips and runs: no installer, no redistributables, no account, no activation server, and nothing to sign in to. |
| Pen and tablet | Any pen that speaks Windows Ink (Wacom, XP-Pen, Huion, Surface Pen), with a Wintab fallback for older drivers. One pressure curve in Preferences fits every brush to your hand, and the pen's side button on the paper brings up size, colors and brushes. A mouse works, badly. |
| Language | English or Japanese, switched in Preferences. Make a translation beside it opens a folder with the English list and the steps for writing your own. |
| One hand on the pen | Hold R and roll the stack like paper, every visible layer at once. Two fingers tap to undo and three to redo, a twist turns the paper and snaps it level, a pen flick scrolls the list under it, and sticky Shift and Ctrl latch for a hand that is holding the tablet. |
| If it crashes | A background snapshot is kept while you draw and offered back on the next launch. A save that fails asks whether to retry or save elsewhere, and is never a loss. |
| Extending | The Effects menu takes a new item for each plugin DLL dropped in the folder. The extra video formats, the update check, the brush converter, Harmony rig import and the pose packs ship as separate add-ons. |
What it doesn't do yet, and what to use instead, is on the compare page.