Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 4, 2012. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
As already announced, the first developer tools are said to have been integrated into the software. With the open-source Houdini Ocean Toolkit project, it is now intended to be possible to simulate water surfaces including waves and foam crests.
The new Movie Clip Editor in Blender is intended to enable motion tracking, so that camera moves from real films can be imported. For this purpose, it is intended to be possible to load and edit a film snippet in the editor.
In addition, according to Blender, the new Cycles rendering engine is integrated as a preview version. According to Blender, Cycles uses ray tracing, which is intended to allow interactive rendering and revised integration of textures.
As a new physical system, the Dynamic modifier is intended to be able to turn objects into paint tools. This is intended to make complex effects such as footprints in snow or raindrops wetting the ground possible. In addition, effects created in Blender are now intended to be exportable to Adobe After Effects. The Blender developers are said to have eliminated around 180 errors with this update.
Blender 2.61 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS x in a 32- and a 64-bit version, and a variant for PowerPC is also still available.
You can find the download here.
