Beyond Blender 2.60

Not only has Blender 2.60 come out in the last couple weeks, but also a bugfix 'a' release, which brings the latest version of Blender up to 2.60a (Which you can download here, if you haven't already...)! This release brought us 3D audio, video sequencing improvements, vertex weight groups, navigation meshes (for the game engine), even greater improvements to the animation system and better support for other languages. You can see the full release log here if you want.

Now it's the Blender developers are gearing up for their 2.61 release, which should occur sometime in December. This release is set to bring a number of very large improvements!

Although the timeline above doesn't show you, there are actually four new branches which have been added to the development version of Blender. Cycles and motion tracking are two of them, and the other two are dynamic paint (remember the spinning balls of paint? Of course you do!), and the Ocean Sim branch. Cycles has been merged as an addition to the BI engine, but it is not meant to replace Blender Internal, instead it will come as another option in render engines drop-down menu. The motion tracking branch is an amazing addition to Blender as well and is creating many new ways to use Blender. Motion tracking and the Ocean Sim are equally mind blowing.

Andrew Price over at Blender Guru has written up a post detailing these four new features and how to use them. These four major features, as well as all the small bug fixes and tweaks, are going to make for a wonderful 2.61 release! Look forward to it happening sometime in the next month.