Blender 2.63 released with long-awaited features and 150 bug fixes

Blender is a full-fledged 3D suite for animation, rendering, modelling, interactive creation and more, features exposed via its fancy and fast OpenGL-based interface.

Blender 2.63 has been released, version focused mainly on integrating and stabilizing long-awaited capabilities.

What is new in Blender 2.63?

• BMesh (a newly implemented mesh system wish full support for N-sided polygons, as opposed to only triangles and quads)
• 2D-related Motion Tracker enhancements
• support for panoramic cameras, mirror ball environment textures and float precision textures
• sculpt hiding (ability to hide potions of the mesh in sculpt mode)
• improved add-ons and new features (Movie Clip option in the Sequencer, Linux support for drag&drop from external apps, new tools fro linking and detaching nodes, etc)
• "this release was mainly focused on stabilizing BMesh, but also includes 150 fixes for bugs that existed in previous releases"

How do we install Blender 2.63?
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