Blender 2.63 RC1 Released!

The Blender Foundation have released  Blender 2.63 RC1!

The release adds some really big improvements, including a totally rewritten mesh system that supports Ngons!

After months of hard work, the team is close to release this version with a completely modernized Mesh system!

BMesh

• BMesh is the new Blender mesh system with full support for N-sided polygons instead of only triangles and quads.
• In particular there is a new Dissolve tool to remove vertices, edges and faces without making holes in the mesh, a new Inset tool to inset faces, and a much improved Knife tool which takes advantage of N-gons to generate clear cuts. Tools such as subdivide and loop cut will also generate clean topology because faces no longer have to be triangulated.

Cycles

• Among the features added in this release are support for rendering environment maps, render layer mask layers, a shadow render pass, ambient occlusion and float precision textures.

Motion Tracker

• Motion tracking got some improvements which are mostly relates on 2D stabilization and few smaller tools.

More Features

• Other new features in this release include face hiding for sculpting, a compositing node to output multiple files at once or multilayer EXR files, new tools for linking and detaching nodes and more particle rotation options.

View the release notes HERE and download it for free HERE in multiple OS flavours