Blender 2.46

Yay, Blender 2.46 is out! It's got a bunch of awesome new features. Release notes can be found here.
I'm really excited about some of these new features. My favorites:

• Glossy reflections
• Continuous physics
• Soft shadows
• New particle system
• Cloth simulations

I've been using the beta version for about 2 weeks now, so I'm glad I can use all these new features I've been testing. Here are some of the cooler updates:

Hair and Fur

Many features have been added to make fur and grass rendering for Peach possible. Big improvements were made in visual quality, rendering speed and memory usage.

Image Browsing

The new Image Browser is blazingly fast and stable, and not only allows to browse for images in your filesystem, but can also show previews of materials, textures, world, lamp and image data.

Glossy Reflections

Reflections and refractions are now possible to be rendered with a glossiness factor, controlling the roughness of material.

Physics caching and baking

The softbody, cloth and particle physics now use a unified system for caching and baking. For real-time tweaking, a new option "Continue Physics" will continue the simulation regardless of the current frame.

Soft Shadows

Raytraced soft shadows are now possible for all lamp types; including spot, sun and point lights.

Particle system rewrite

The particle system has been rewritten from scratch. It now allows advanced hair grooming tools, but also much better physics, boid animation and even explosions!

Cloth simulation

Cloth simulation is available in Blender via a modifier on Mesh objects. Cloth then realistically and in real-time interacts with other objects, the wind or other forces, all of which is fully under your control.

Approximate AO

Ambient Occlusion is a render option that darkens areas with less visibility, simulating the effect of environment light. This new AO option is based on quick approximation, giving many factors of speedup.

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QMC & Adaptive Sampling

Blender now includes two new sampling methods, using a Halton sequence (Adaptive QMC) and a Hammersley sequence (Constant QMC).
Raytracing now also supports adaptive sampling.

Sequencer

Many many new goodies in our Video Sequence Editor:

• UI made more accessible, new panels/views
• Built-in strip blending
• Color correction tools
• Markers, NTSC support, preview, ...

UV texture editing

UV texture coordinates now are accessible via regular Mesh editmode. And many more features were added such as:

• UV draw types
• Solid opengl view with textures
• 2d cursor in Image window