Grease Pecil

recently Aligorith developed the first version of 3dview notes functionality, which means the director or animators can make notes in 3dview as you can see in this screenshot



patch can be found here

Simple Deform Modifier

recently anew mod has been developed, simple deform, what this mod does is curve/taper/twist the mesh, for simple shapes
in the following screen shot is from far right to left, base cube, curve, twist, taper


this mod can be found in the shrinkwrap branch

Harmonic Skeleton Generation

this feature had a breif stint in svn before 2.46 but was declared to buggy and hard to use, since then it has been under a recode in its own branch and it has become more usful, including a visualisation of the harmonic graph

here is a screen shot of it in action on a quick dummy


the paper and demo vid can be found here
http://www-evasion.imag.fr/Publications/2007/AHLD07/

Procedual Ocean Texture

recently a patch was made that contained a procedual ocean texture, used ofcourse for oceans, it was originally made for ProMotion studio and is now freely available

just a quick test

baked shadows

Thats right you can now bake shadows easily now, you bake them just like AO or textures, select shadow in the bake tab, the baked result is the same as the shadowpass, so its either bright white to black

the shadows in the render


the Baked shadows