3D Software : Blender 2.4

Blender has had another long development cycle resulting in a release
packed with rewrites, new features and improvements. The major additions this release are the Character Animation rewrite, the added Fluid Dynamics system, improved editing and rendering of Particle Based Hair, and the Modifier Stack.

Character Animation

The vastly improved animation tools have taken character animation to an inspirational and competitive level. Improvements include fast and easy rigging with added bone types, new display methods, easier and
faster skin weighting methods, improved and easier to use deformation methods, completely rewritten Inverse Kinematics system, easier and faster posing, new IPO curves methods, and more robust Actions and NLA tools.
Technical background on how Armatures and Posing work in Blender

Note The changes in the animation system have not yet been incorporated in the game engine, so armatures don’t work there. The Python API for Armature/Pose also has radical changes.

Dependency Graph

This is the first part of our Animation project, and although we cannot show cool images for it, work on the new dependency graph system has proven to be extremely versatile, resulting in amazing speedup and lag-free interactive redraws while editing.

(Image by: Schuh)

Rigging

Rigging is now much easier with mirrored extrusion and auto-naming, additional selection methods working with bones such as loop and border select, and added bone types (Hinge, Bspline Bones).
All Armature Objects are immediate posable now, without mode changes.