Ton Roosendaal , a chairman of the Blender Foundation, announced the availability of a Blender 2.61 beta test build, and invites the community to test it. New features in Blender 2.61 include integrated motion tracking for video footage, the new Cycles renderer, dynamic paint (turn objects into paintbrushes), Ocean Sim and export to Adobe After Effects and many more. While many new features have been added, 117 bugs have also been fixed. You now can download testbuilds with the 2.61 features included. You can download it, if you follow the link at the end of this article.
Motion tracking support has been added, to reconstruct camera and object animation from real footage, and composite 3d rendered object into movie clips.
Cycles is a new render engine that is available next to Blender Internal. It is a raytracing based render engine with support for interactive rendering, a new shading node system, new texture workflow and GPU acceleration.
Dynamic paint is a new modifier and physics system that can turn objects into paint canvases and brushes, creating each vertex colors, image sequences or displacement.
Ocean simulation tools take the form of a modifier, to simulate and generate a deforming ocean surface, and associated texture, used to render the simulation data.
A new addon was added to export animation data to Adobe After Effects. The camera and placeholders for all of the objects you select can be exported and used to link After Effects' filters or layers basing on your scene created in Blender.
For more details visit: Blendernation