A new release, with loads of new features and documentation! Check the links below for in-depth descriptions.

Below you also find the notes for the 2.35a upgrade.

A new global undo system has been added, giving full multiple level undo capabilities in all areas of Blender. The new global hotkey for undo is Ctrl Z, and Ctrl Shift Z for redo (Cmd Z and Cmd Shift Z also work on Mac OS X).

The Outliner is a new hierarchical diagram displaying a list of data in Blender and its dependencies. It can currently be used to select and activate various parts of Blender data for editing and visualisation.

Blender's mesh editing has been given a huge overhaul, with new vertex, edge and face selection modes, direct editing of the subdivision surface and not just the poly cage, Zbuffer clipped (ignoring occluded) selection, new extrusion types, new edge/face loop selection, FGons, edge rotation, and much more.

Hooks are a new way to deform the underlying geometry of Meshes, Curves, Surfaces or Lattices, at an object level, allowing you to manipulate groups of vertices or control points with weighting, using 'hook' objects to influence them.

Blender Python is going through general clean-up and internal restructuring of the code. Many modules have been added and upgraded, bundled scripts have been updated as well, with documentation built-in via the new script browser.

As with Lattices and Armatures, Blender now supports deforming meshes with curves. The new option is found when parenting an object to a curve (Ctrl P).

Tapering is a new feature that works alongside bevelling on curve objects. Similar to how BevOb is used to define the cross-section of a curve, TaperOb defines the width along the length of the curve.

Mesh objects with static particles can now use dupliverts to duplicate other objects along the length of the particle trail, useful for making plants or other interesting things.

New additions to the renderer include dithering to prevent coloured banding, and support for ambient occlusion in Only Shadow rendering.

Stretch To is a new constraint that lets a bone stretch between its root or an object stretch from its center point, targeting another object, making it much easier to set up automatically bulging muscles in an armature.

Live updates of buttons and menus have been recoded to not use frontbuffer drawing anymore, resulting in substantial speedup, better compliancy with OpenGL and enabling interesting new features like transparent drawing.

Antialised drawing for buttons and fonts has been improved too.

The internal time system and collisions have been improved, which gives nice speedup in physics. Work on stereo display has been done plus lotsa bug fixes were done. All releases as offered now include the stand alone player too, including saving content as a 'runtime'.

Hats off for the dev team, again!

Of the hundreds reports we got in since the last release in August, 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!