Blender 2.40 has been released !

New features

List from blender3d.org :: Blender 2.40
  • Character Animation
  • Dependency Graph
  • Rigging
  • Inverse Kinematics (With support from Googles Summer of Code – Blender's IK system was fully reworked. Not only did it become much faster, but it now supports Rotation Limits and Degrees of Freedom, Tree-IK, and IK Target Rotation.)
  • Skin Weighting
  • Armature Display
  • Stride Support
  • Shape Keys
  • Drivers
  • Animation Curve Interpolation
  • Actions and NLA
  • Particles and Physics simulation
  • Fluid Simulation (The second of the Google Summer of Code projects that made it in our release is the exciting Fluid Simulator, allowing to animate a physical correct flow of any fluid type.)
  • Particle Guides and distribution
  • Hair strand rendering
  • Rigid Body
  • Modifier Stack
  • Subdivide and Loop tools
  • Boolean Operations (This Google Summer of Code project delivered us a full new and much better library for intersecting Mesh models. Main target was to generate new models with the least amount of new faces, with regular and pleasant subdivisions.)
  • Mesh Ripping
  • UV & Image Editing
  • Unicode 3D Fonts
  • Radial Blend Texture
  • Sampling and Filtering
  • Python Scripting (New or rewritten modules were added: Mesh, Armature, Key, and Mathutils.)
  • Improvements in the UI include: New Lamp drawing types, new Object-center drawing, New Camera view drawing and Passepartout view, Easier window merging, new Toolbox layout, improved Text button, and so on... check the article linked above for a full overview!