• Howler can now utilize up to 64 processors or threads.  It previously had problems above around 12.
• You can now set an arbitrary thread count for testing purposes.

Ambient occlusion & Shading for foliage brushes

• Foliage now receives shadows. (such as from itself, i.e. other branches nearby, overlapping leaves, etc...)
  
• What you see is what you get with foliage painting now.  There is no more preview phase followed by final phase.
  
• Foliage painting is now much faster and uses multi-threading.
• There is no longer a redraw phase.  Everything such as depth sorting is now done on-the-fly, as you draw.  Depth queue rendering is now a simple pixel filter.
• There are new presets for foliage brushes
  

3D Designer

• The 3D designer tool now uses a full floating point gamut, which makes lighting more intuitive.  Brighter specular highlights are possible.  Final rendering is cleaner and smoother.
• Ambient occlusion, shading and lighting in 3D Designer..  Ambient occlusion simulates shadows from nearby objects, and within cracks and crevices. We're experimenting with various modes such as additive for snow caps, and slope dependency. 3D Designer also casts shadows from the first light source. It can be soft shadows, and is ultrafast, being on the GPU.
  
• Erosion: adds gullies to sloped areas
• Better Lighting through higher dynamic range in lighting values. Specular highlights look better.
  
• Sediments & Sediment Coloring: changes the terrain's elevation to make it look like sediments deposited from erosion. It's a bit like a delta forming at the bottom end of a large river. But it's also showing alongside a steep cliff. You can adjust its elevation and slope. The optional coloring of those sediment banks can add some nice appearance of packs of snow in areas formed by the sediments.
  
• Clouds in 3D Designer: you can load one of several presets of clouds. These clouds can then be positioned, scaled and changed in brightness, glow and self-shading. You can also create your own clouds in the new Particle modeler, save it, and then load it here in 3D Designer. The intent is to have bits of clouds hanging around the valleys or mountain peaks, appearing a bit like volumetric clouds.
  
• Realtime shadows, software shadows, raytraced on GPU
• Snow, Erosion and Raytraced shadows: adding coloring based on height and slope, plus erosion for eroded valleys and gullies, and cast shadows, all contribute to a greatly enriched look,
  

Exporting the terrain mesh to Wavefront OBJ 3D format

• It is now possible to Store a number of resources that 3D Designer creates, such as the erosion map or texture color map. The terrain mesh can also be exported to a Wavefront OBJ file. This mesh includes the effect of erosion as well as sediments.

Gradient panel:

• You can now double click the color entry arrowheads as a shortcut to bring up the color selector panel.

Gradient list:

• fixed a bug that could cause a crash.

Particle Modeler:

• Model the patchy shapes of clouds, and render them.
• Animate and render the clouds
  
• Save the clouds for use in 3D Designer too

New Adjustable Light Table

• the enhanced Onion Skins: previously 2 frames before and after the current rame. Now it shows 3 on each side, and you can adjust their respective levels of transparency. There's even a color coding option to help distinguish the 'before'-frames from the 'after'-frames. That's particularly useful if the movement of the objects in the frames is somewhat erratic and going back and forth, such as a yoyo going down and up, or a pendulum swinging left to right.
  

Local contrast

•  We're simulating high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) by way local contrast improvement. Instead of adjusting dynamic range over the whole image, we do it in small chunks. For some types of images, this adds a whole new dimension of rich colors. If you're a fan of bicycles, you'll love this.