Download Blender 2.61

Version 2.61 of the open source and cross platform 3D program Blender has been released. The application is intended for 3d modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. More information about the extensive possibilities of Blender can be found on this page are being found. This program includes the open source animation movies Elephant’s Dream, Big Buck Bunny and cinder created. In version 2.61 the following changes and improvements have been made:

Cycles Render Engine
Cycles is a new render engine that is available next to Blender Internal. It is a raytracing based render engine with support for interactive rendering, a new shading node system, new texture workflow and GPU acceleration. It is still in development, and more production features are planned to be added, this is the first preview release.

Dynamic Paint
Dynamic paint is a new modifier and physics system that can turn objects into paint canvases and brushes, creating vertex colors, image sequences or displacement. This makes many effects possible that were previously difficult to achieve, for example footsteps in the snow, raindrops that make the ground wet, paint that sticks to walls, or objects that gradually freeze.

More features
Camera sensor size and presets, improved image saving, 3D mouse color wheel editing, more translations to other languages, node muting improvements, region drawing tweaks, and many more small changes.

Add-ons
New Addons in this release are an Adobe After Effects exporter, Atomic Blender (Protein Data Bank) file importer, Acclaim and C3D motion capture importers, and Nuke camera animation exporter and importer.

Motion Tracking
Motion tracking support has been added, to reconstruct camera and object animation from real footage, and composite 3d rendered object into movie clips. A new Movie Clip editor for loading clips, tracking points and reconstructing motion was added. Constraints can apply this reconstructed motion into the scene, and compositing nodes are available for (un)di deposit rendered animations or real footage.

Ocean Simulation
Ocean simulation tools take the form of a modifier, to simulate and generate a deforming ocean surface, and associated texture, used to render the simulation data. Ported from the open source Houdini Ocean Toolkit, it is intended to simulate deep ocean waves and foam.

Python API
The render engine API has been extended for closer integration, a mechanism to detect changes in scenes was and persistent callbacks were added, the noise module was updated, and easier access to library datablocks was added, along with various other changes.

Bug fixes
180 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed!
Blender 2.57 screenshot. Click on the image for a larger version.