A fresh release packed with new features, and documented as never before! Check the links below for in-depth descriptions.

Particles can now interact with objects in two more ways: by making an object act as a force field or vortex field, or by making an object's faces deflect particles. This is useful for many things, including water or fire effects, and swarming 3D objects using duplicate objects (dupliverts).

LSCM (Least Squares Conformal Map) is a new UV tool that is capable of unwrapping arbitrary surfaces, preserving local angles in geometry to ensure a smoothly fitting UV layout. LSCM is available with the existing UV tools in UV Face Select mode, with Face -> Unwrap UVs ("U" key) or in the UV Calculation panel (Edit buttons). Like the existing UV unwrap methods, it unwraps the currently selected faces.

Yafray, the advanced raytracer with global illumination and photon mapping, is now integrated with Blender as a plug-in. Once installed, you now can use this render engine as easily as if it's built in. Further support for Blender features in Yafray has been added, as well as better control over these features from Blender, like the new Photon Light for caustics rendering.

With "SubSurfs" as today's standard for organic modeling, the addition of edge creases now allows users to model fine details in SubSurf meshes without needing to add more control points.

The transparent integration of Python scripts in the UI now offers not only import or export, but also menu and button access for scripted tools.

Read the release notes with the link above, or the general introduction to bundled scripts.

New features were added, as well a lot of maintenance work was done on the game engine, and saving stand-alone 'run times' is now possible again. On Windows, Blender can save a project as .exe, on OSX as .app, and on Linux/Unix as a regular binary.

Blender's OSA (oversampling) render option in Blender was always heavily optimized for scanline rendering. The new "Full OSA" option now enables rendering all samples, giving full antialiasing for specular highlights, shading and textures as well.

The new "Ramp" controls in Blender lets a user set a range of colors for a material's diffuse and specular components, define how that range will vary over a surface, and how it blends with the 'actual color'. This can enable more realistic appearance for natural materials like skin.

* Blender's 'static particles', which can be used to for a fur or grass appearance, can now be animated to deform along with characters

* New blending modes for layering textures or ramp shaders

* Improved phong shading model to prevent raytraced shadow errors

Each button in Blender showing an RGB color now invokes the new color picker menu... and not only that, pickers can be integrated anywhere in the UI as for example the Nkey menu while 3d painting.

Blender's hidden treasure, the built in video sequence editor, now supports effects for creating a variation of wipe transitions.

- Help menu calls internet browser with important links to documentation

- Further python integration in menus allows any scripter to make own tools

- Left/Right mouse usage can be switched

- New zoom methods

Hats off for the dev team!

Of the almost 300 reports we got in since the last release in May, we verified about half of them as valid bugs, and fixed almost ALL of them. So we still have a clean tracker with less than 30 pending reports.

BTW: you need to subscribe to projects.blender.org to submit a report, that's of great help to communicate with the reporter. So please keep reporting!