Blender gains Motion Tracking, new rendering engine and dynamic paint

A huge Blender update is being released

I've worked with blender since 1999 (version 1.6.x, when it was still shareware), and its growth over the past ten years has been outstanding. I'm not a 3d professional but, instead, use it for all kinds of things: Demo and Mock animations / movies, creating icons for apps (almost all my apps' icons were created in Blender), cutting videos (iMovie is a great app, but for quick and short movie edits, the one in Blender is actually superior). It even has a built-in game engine and can be connected to various open source 3d engines. Blender is really powerful.

Blender is, in a way, similar to VIM or Emacs, in that the user interface is highly optimized for keyboard navigation. A lot of things can be done with the mouse and the keyboard without ever having to move through long and convoluted menus or hierachies.

It's also scriptable in Python. It's one of the first apps I install on my machines.