Blender 2.62 released with new features (PPA available)

Blender is a versatile 3D suite for modelling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and more, featuring a fancy, professional interface.

Blender 2.62 has been released, adding new features, bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements.

What is new in Blender 2.62?

• enhanced Motion Tracking, adding object tracking support, thus being able to reconstruct from footage animation and transformation of objects in the scene
• new features added to Cycles Render Engine, including render layers and passes, multi GPU rendering, border rendering, improved sampling for complex environment maps, etc
• new UV editing tools (advanced interactive stitch tool, sculpting tools, etc)
• polished Game Engine's UI with improved fullscreen and antialised rendering
• Remesh modifier, a tool useful for generating a mesh topology based on an input surface
• much, much more

How do we install Blender 2.62?
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 a manual alternative, download Blender 2.62, unpack the archive and run it by double-clicking on the blender executable.

Ike AhLoe created and submitted a theme to Blender, theme accepted and landed in Blender, Ubuntu Ambiance, that comes as an improvement in terms of look and feel, combining a slightly modified Ambiance-based "feel" with Blender's complex UI.

Furthermore, the above theme brings a "blending" between the titlebar and toolbar.

The selection is simple, the needed steps are:

• Blender-->File-->User Preferences-->Themes-->Presets-->select Ubuntu Ambiance
• then, right-click on the small button (located near File) and select Flip to Top