The Blender Foundation has finally released Blender 2.64. This release was targeted at improving Blender for the Mango open movie project, along with integrating branches and patches from the past years.
The focus was on creating a full VFX pipeline, with improved motion tracking using a planar tracker, easier green screen keying, and a new mask editor. A new tile based compositing system was added, along with more advanced color management. Cycles rendering got dozens of smaller features and improvements resulting from its use in production.
Sculpting now supports masks, and a skin modifier was added to quickly create a model from skeletons. The game engine got improved shadows and physics options, and Collada export now has more options to tune for exporting to other game engines.
Key changes and updates:
Mask editor - Masks can now be created in the image and movie clip editor. They can be used in compositing to define areas of influence for nodes or block out unwanted objects.
Compositing - This new tiled based compositor gives quicker feedback while editing and uses less memory to support working with high resolutions.
Motion Tracker - Motion tracking was significantly improved by adding planar tracking, and unifying the existing trackers into one Hybrid tracker with finer control.
Green Screen - There is now a new keying node conveniently combining various features from existing nodes along with a new keying algorithm, to makes setup much faster. There is also a keying screen node which produces a gradiented plate to deal with uneven colors of green screens.
Color - OpenColorIO is now integrated into Blender, along with a redesign of the color management system. Now many more color spaces are supported with finer control over which color transformations should be used for display, applied on renders, and used for loading and saving image files.
Cycles Render - Cycles now includes a new non-progressive integrator, tiled rendering with support for save buffers, considerably faster BVH building and multithreaded image loading, and motion vector and UV render passes.
Sculpting- Sculpting has received some major improvements such has masking to control which areas of the mesh are influenced by sculpting, new brush map modes to control how textures are projected onto the model, and an input stroke averaging option to make brush strokes smoother.
For download or for see full list of change visit: Blender