Blender 2.40 released

Blender 2.40 has been released.The major additions this release are the Character Animation rewrite, the added Fluid Dynamics system, improved editing and rendering of Particle Based Hair, and the Modifier Stack.

This new release is the result of two big events: Google Summer of Code and Project Orange.

With the Summer of Code, Google has sponsored several Open Source projects and Blender was one of them. Check out the excellent new Fluid Simulator, Inverse Kinematics and Boolean Operations.
Project Orange, if you didn't know already, is an effort headed by Blender creator Ton Roosendaal to create a short movie using only Open Source tools. While the artists are slaving away in the studio, Ton is coding like a madman and creating the tools that they need. Pretty much all the other new stuff is from his hand.

Read more in the complete releaselog or download the new version straight away.

Oh, a word of warning: there's an issue on OS X 10.4.3 and Apple's drivers of Nvidia graphics cards. Word is that 10.4.4 will contain a fix for this. In the mean time, maximising the Blender window sometimes helps.