Project Dogwaffle Howler has moved into its 2027 release cycle, and the headline feature is not subtle: Howler 2027 introduces Howler 3D, a new 3D content creation and rendering environment inside the Windows-only painting, animation and video-processing tool.
Howler 3D is technically implemented as a plugin inside Howler. It can be launched from the Render menu, but can also run as a separate process. This fits: Howler has always been difficult to classify neatly, which is inconvenient for anyone trying to file it under one boring software label. It combines digital painting, animation, video processing, FX tools and some 3D functionality in one rather eccentric package. We covered Howler 2025 and Howler 2026, both of which already pushed the tool further into AI-assisted image editing, animation and low-cost production utility territory.
Howler 3D: OBJ meshes, PBR and image-based lighting
The new Howler 3D environment supports OBJ model import, PBR materials (first promised 2 years ago) and image-based lighting. Its includes point, spot and distance lights, shadows, reflections through an SSR hybrid pipeline, refraction with thickness, IOR and attenuation controls, SSAO with temporal noise reduction, progressive multi-pass accumulation for GI-style rendering and ACES tonemapping with exposure controls.
For object work, Howler 3D supports positioning, scaling and orientation, along with grounding, centering, smoothing, arrays, bevels, extrusions and curve primitives. Posts from Dan Ritchie in the PD Howler Facebook group add some development-build context: Lathe is now fully implemented, while Extrude is still in progress. So the 3D tool is not being presented as a frozen cathedral of finished software. It is more of a workshop with active power tools, which is either exciting or a small OSHA incident, depending on your temperament.
The material side includes diffuse, roughness, metallic, normal, emission and clearcoat channels. Transparent and refractive materials are also supported, with depth compositing. The tool also includes an internal procedural material system called L-MTL, which currently powers procedural textures such as Perlin noise, vector noise, brick patterns, checkers and gradients, with operators including mix, multiply, displace, slope and incidence.
A full node-graph material editor is not listed as part of the current release. The system appears to be designed with this kind of expansion in mind, but that remains a future-facing direction rather than something users should assume is already in the build.
Outpaint Fill extends and repairs image areas
Howler 2027 also adds Outpaint Fill, an object-removal and background-extension tool. Users select an area of an image, and Howler attempts to fill or extend it from the surrounding image information. That places it closer to a content-aware repair and outpainting workflow than to a full generative-image system.
Timeline editing gets new curve math
The timeline also receives a more technical update. Keyframes can now be edited directly from the Timeline panel. The Facebook development notes add a more specific detail: in Build 8, Ritchie says the old curve math has been replaced with modern standard chordal Hermite curves.
That matters because curve behavior is one of those details that animators only talk about when it goes wrong, at which point everyone suddenly becomes a mathematician against their will. Keyframes are now editable and the form dynamically adapts to the range of all inputs.
Other development notes from the Facebook group mention a categorized-view fix for the canvas-size panel, a numeric-panel change, lens flares and a Howler canvas-panel bug fix. These are smaller items, but they show that the current 2027 cycle is not just about the headline 3D feature. It is also cleaning up and reshaping surrounding workflow panels.
New creation panels and animation context
Howler 2027 also adds new Canvas Creation and Animation Creation panels. These fit into the application’s broader animation feature set, which already includes timeline tools, onion skinning, frame repair, retiming and exposure-sheet features for lip-sync animation.
For anyone new to the tool, Howler is not a typical DCC application and not a normal painting package either. It grew out of Project Dogwaffle and still carries that slightly unruly lineage. The result is a tool that can handle natural-media painting, animation, video processing, procedural imagery, particles, terrain-like rendering, image repair and now a more ambitious 3D rendering environment.
That does not mean it replaces Blender, Maya, Houdini or a normal compositing pipeline. It also should not be judged by that standard. Howler’s appeal is more specific: it is low-cost, strange in productive ways, fast to experiment with, and often aimed at artists who want direct visual tools without assembling a small software empire just to make a moving image.
Availability and pricing
Howler 2027 is available for Windows only. The release is still officially described as a pre-order, but buyers receive what is described as a generally stable build immediately.
The listed MSRP is 56.99 US dollars, with a launch sale price of 27.99 US dollars at the time of writing.
Sources: PD Howler What’s New, PD Howler Facebook group.
