The much anticipated Blender 2.46 has finally been officially released! The work of the past half year - also thanks to the open movie project "Big Buck Bunny" - has resulted in a greatly improved feature set, now released as Blender 2.46, the "Bunny release"! This version supports a new particle system with hair and fur combing tools, fast and optimal fur rendering, a mesh deformation system for advanced character rigging, cloth simulation, fast Ambient Occlusion, a new Image browser, and that's just the beginning. Check the extensive list of features in the log below... have fun!
- Hair and Fur
- Image Browsing
- Glossy Reflections
- Render Baking
- Physics caching and baking
- Armature Drawing
- Armature Tools
- Skinning improvements
- Game Engine improvements
- Soft Shadows
- Render Pipeline
- Shading features
- Python Scripts and API
- Particle system rewrite
- Cloth simulation
- Approximate AO
- Mesh Deform Modifier
- Action Editor improvements
- Constraint System
- QMC & Adaptive Sampling
- Sequencer
- UV texture editing
- Node editor
- NDOF devices support
- Align to Transform Orientation
- Pole target for IK chains
- Pose Libraries
- Weight Paint visualization
- Multi-Modifier support
- Weight-group selecting
- Custom transform orientations
- Distributed rendering options
- External Paths Tools
- Automerge
- Recursive Dupli Groups
Code:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/
:)
Blender 2.4.6 Released! 
Linear Mode
