Blender's particle tools have had several upgrades for Blender 2.5, making them more interactive and easier to manipulate. Alongside the particles themselves, Blender's force fields have also had improvements, making them more predictable and controllable.
Between Blender 2.55 and Blender 2.56 release more than 50 bugs related to particles, smoke and pointcache have been fixed.
Now any physics system that uses Blender's point cache can be edited after baking. Using the same brush tools as the existing hair strand styling, you can edit particle, soft body vertex or cloth sim vertex trajectories in time, with ghosting to show before and after. This functionality is available in Particle Mode for objects with baked point caches.
Hair now uses the cloth system, rather than softbody, for animating hair strand dynamics. It currently uses a basic internal friction force to quickly emulate self collisions and volume preservation. Collisions with other objects are disabled for now and will be worked out in the future. As a result of the earlier point cache update the hair dynamics can now be edited in particle mode after baking just like particle, cloth and soft body bakes.
- Unified scene wide gravity (currently in scene buttons) instead of each simulation having it's own gravity.
- Weight parameters for all effectors and an effector group setting.- Every effector can use noise.
- Most effectors have "shapes" point, plane, surface, every point.
- New effector fields "turbulence", which creates nice random flow paths, and "drag", which slows the points down.
by particles developer, Janne Karhu: