Blender 2.46 was released yesterday and it has a whole bunch of new features- mostly created to facilitate production of Big Buck Bunny.  What I’m looking forward to the most is hair/fur rendering, any tools that make armatures easier to skin (the bane of my animation hobby!), a cloth simulator, and the improved sequencer which should allow most of the video editing to take place inside of Blender.

I’d love to play with it, but right now I’m working on some animation projects so I need to wait until at least Fedora comes out with the 2.46 rpm.  Ideally also my FreeBSD render farm would also get updated.  A lot of the new goodies like hair/fur rendering are not backwards compatible.  Good job from the coding team and I hope to test it out soon enough.