------------------------- Blender 2.42 release ----------------

July 14th, 2006
 
After the 2.40 animation recode, this second "Orange" release focuses 
mainly on the render pipeline. Our coders have been very busy meeting 
the requirements for the Elephants Dream movie and this has resulted in 
a big boost of the development:
 
- The render pipeline was completly rewritten and became 
  tile-based and fully threaded, supporting advanced preview 
  renders, layer-rendering and pass render, with a tight 
  integration to the compositor. 
 
- Node based materials boost blender capabilities in this
  area. For an easy migration, old materials are still there.
  New shaders includes anisotropic and fresnel. Ray-tracing now
  supports transmissivity and 'total internal reflection'.
 
- A new compositor, also node based, allowing powerful imaging
  manipulations, including vector blur.
 
- New industry standard exchange formats. This includes OpenEXR, 
  Cineon, DPX and Collada.
 
- The already topnotch LSCM unwrapper was further expanded to 
  ABF++, which means unwrapping is now more automatic with
  less stretching, interactively updated while editing. 
  A minimize stretch tool was added for local adjustments.
 
- Game engine was greatly expanded with now full use of the new
  Bullet physics library.
 
- The Blender Video Sequence editor now allows to edit unlimited 
  amounts of images and videos, became full float-images aware, 
  and - for Linux only now - supports FFMPEG with a large range
  of codecs for audio and video.
 
- Hundreds of bugs were mercyless hunted and killed.
 
And much more goodies.
 
For html versions of release logs, with images and examples, please check:
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Releaselogs.34.0.html
 
Have fun!
 
The blender.org team.