the project had four main goals: create new tools for editing and rendering hair, fur or grass in Blender, improve on character animation tools to make them more suitable to "cartoonish" motion, put the software through its paces for rendering large outdoor environments, and "further validate Blender as a professional animation creation suite." Secondary to those main goals, the open movie project provides everyone in the Blender community with professional-level source files to modify, remix, and learn from

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Cloth Simulation

Cloth simulation is available in Blender via a modifier on Mesh objects. Cloth then realistically and in real-time interacts with other objects, the wind or other forces, all of which is fully under your control.

Hair and Fur

Many features have been added to make fur and grass rendering for Peach possible. Big improvements were made in visual quality, rendering speed and memory usage.

Glossy Reflections

Reflections and refractions are now possible to be rendered with a glossiness factor, controlling the roughness of material.

Skinning improvements

Bone Heat Weighting is a new method to create vertex weights for bone deformation, it generates better results, and does not require setting a radius for bones. Also added was Quaternion-Interpolated Deformation for superior blends

QMC & Adaptive Sampling

Blender now includes two new sampling methods, using a Halton sequence (Adaptive QMC) and a Hammersley sequence (Constant QMC).
Raytracing now also supports adaptive sampling.

Soft Shadows

Raytraced soft shadows are now possible for all lamp types; including spot, sun and point lights.

Game Engine improvements

The Blender GameEngine has seen a great deal of improvement with an increase in play-back speed, a number of nice new features including 2D filter compositing, and of course attention to quality through bug fixes.

UV texture editing

UV texture coordinates now are accessible via regular Mesh editmode. And many more features were added such as:

UV draw types
Solid opengl view with textures
* 2d cursor in Image window

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Blender is a 3D animation program released as free software. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications. Blender is available for several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD with unofficial ports for BeOS, SkyOS, AmigaOS, MorphOS and Pocket PC. Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Lightwave and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, and softbody dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting.

Blender screenshot (source: Wikimedia)

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