Recently the Blender Foundation has mad available Blender 2.63 with some major improvements and some pretty major features as well. Blender 2.63 has completely revamped the Meshing system with BMesh having full support for N-sided polygons instead of only triangles and quads.

In BMesh there is a new dissolve tool for the removal of vertices, edges, and faces without making holes in the mesh. Blender’s BMesh also has an inset tool for insetting faces and a much improved knife tool.

BMesh is the new Blender mesh system with full support for N-sided polygons instead of only triangles and quads.

Blender 2.63 has also made additions to the Cycles Rendering Engine, adding support for a panoramic camera, mirror ball environment, render layer mask layers, a shadow render pass, ambient occlusion, float precision textures, and viewport display of background images and render layers.

For more information on what is new, what is improved and what has changed, visit the Blender 2.63 site here.