Blender 2.61 stable released with numerous bug fixes and high-quality new features

Blender, the integrated fully-featured 3D suite for modelling, animation, rendering, etc has just been updated to another consistent release, 2.61, bringing more that 180 bug fixes and numerous high-quality features.

What is new in Blender 2.61?

• new render engine, Cycles, a new render engine with support for interactive rendering, new shading node system, new texture workflow and GPU acceleration
• Dynamic Paint, a new modifier and physics system that can turn objects into paint canvases and brushes, creating vertex colors, image sequences or displacement (useful for effect like footsteps in the snow, raindrops that make the ground wet, etc)



• ocean simulation (useful to simulate a deforming ocean surface)
• motion tracking (used in order to reconstruct camera animation drom real footage into movie clips via a new Movie Clip editor)
• new add-ons (Adobe After Effects exporter, Atomic Blender file importer, Acclaim and C3D motion capture importers, etc)
• much more

How do we install Blender 2.61?
Add the following development PPA (Lucid, Maverick, Natty, Oneiric, Precise)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cheleb/blender-svn

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blender

As an alternative, download Blender 2.61, unpack the archive and run it by double-clicking on the blender executable.

If you are interested in Blender tutorials, take a look at http://iloveubuntu.net/design-oriented-blender-tutorials-gnome-designs-y...