Howler 2026.5 adds 3D landscape generator Fractal Garden
The new Confetti tool introduced in Howler 2026 for creating organic particle effects.
Originally posted on 7 September 2025. Scroll down for news of the Howler 2026.5 update.
Developer Dan Ritchie has begun the Howler 2026 releases, the latest annual series of updates to the hard-to-classify digital painting, animation and video processing tool.
Howler 2026 itself adds an AI-based editor capable of inpainting, colorizing and upscaling images, a Confetti tool for organic particle effects, and new audio recording and editing tools.
Subsequent updates have introduced a new set of web-based tools, released in parallel with the desktop software, including Fractal Garden, a complete procedural 3D landscape generator.
An idiosyncratic low-cost natural media paint package with a lot of unexpected features
Originally released two decades ago, Howler – originally Project Dogwaffle – is an idiosyncratic sub-$100 digital painting and content creation tool.
Its core strength is natural media painting, but it also features basic 3D rendering capabilities, primarily for landscapes and foliage, and animation features including a timeline, onion skinning, frame repair, retiming, and an exposure sheet for lip sync animation.
Ritchie had originally intended to stop work on Howler this year, aiming to raise money to release the then-current 2025 version as freeware.
However, he has since decided to resume active development of the software.
Howler 2026: new audio editing and AI-based image editing tools
Howler 2026 adds an experimental AI image editor, making it possible to colorize or upscale images, or to inpaint them by entering a text description of the edit required, as shown above.
Other new features include the Confetti tool, for creating organic particle effects.
You can see it in action in the video at the top of this story, which shows options to change the emitter shape, the particle geometry, and parameters like particle count, size and lifespan.
For post-production work, there are new audio recording and four-track audio editing tools.
Updated 21 January 2026: Dan Ritchie has released Howler 2026.3.
New features include Matrix RichText: a new system for creating “full document-level rich text” directly inside Howler. You can see the range of formatting styles available in the image above.
Howler’s Batch Browser gets a built-in video transcoding tool capable of converting videos between “pretty much all the common formats”, reducing the need to switch to other software.
Updated 24 March 2026: Dan Ritchie has released Howler 2026.5.
It’s an interesting update, introducing a new set of web-based tools developed using Google’s Gemini platform, and available to Howler users through the Gemini website.
Ritchie describes the approach as a quick way to roll out more left-field new toolsets, while continuing to focus on Howler’s traditional tools in the desktop software.
So far, the web apps are all 3D tools, including the modeling app shown above, which supports basic Sub-D surface modeling, and has “some support” for UVs and PBR materials.
Fractal Garden: a browser-based tool for generating low-poly 3D landscapes
But of the new browser-based tools, by far the biggest is Fractal Garden.
It’s a complete 3D landscape generator, generating procedural terrain that can then be populated with instanced rocks and vegetation using a brush-based workflow.
The current release includes 12 types of tree, 12 flowers, and 5 types of grass.
Fractal Garden also supports a biome system, with 11 readymade biomes defined using procedural rules reflecting real-world attributes like slope, altitude, soil type and moisture.
You can get a feel for its output in the image above: the geometry is stylized, but uses a full PBR pipeline, and the environments support clouds and surface water.
The landscapes can be exported to other DCC software in OBJ, GLB, Collada (DAE) and USDZ format: you can see an example of one rendered in Blender on the Howler Facebook group.
Price and system requirements
Howler 2026 is available for Windows only. It has a MSRP of $56.99, but is rarely sold for full price: at the time of posting, it is available for $24.99.
Buyers of Howler automatically get access to the new web-based tools, or you can access them separately by backing Dan Ritchie on Patreon.
Read a list of new features in Howler 2026
See more details of the new features in the PD Howler – Project Dogwaffle Facebook group
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