The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.65. Headline feature this time out is fire simulation, along with other improvements to the smoke simulation system, including a new flow force field, mixing options and support for interactions with collision objects.
The Cycles render engine also gets an update, with support for the Sony Pictures Imageworks-developed Open Shading Language, and there are a few updates to the mesh modelling and editing toolsets.
In addition to the new features, over 200 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.
Some of key updates:
Fire and Smoke - Fire simulation was added to the Smoke Simulator. The domain received major updates to improve performance and usability. Smoke can be emitted from mesh surfaces, without the need for a particle system.
Cycles Render - Support for writing custom shaders in the Open Shading Language is now available. Motion blur rendering was also added, to make moving objects and cameras appear blurry.
Mesh Modeling - The bevel tool now includes rounding and was otherwise much improved, preserving the requested bevel width more evenly and generating better topology. A new symmetrize tool was added to make mesh topology and data symmetric.
Modifiers - The decimator was rewritten, and now preserves UV's and vertex colors, has an un-subdivide and a mode to dissolve vertices to create planar n-gons.