Modeling

New freehand curve drawing tool uses curve fitting for bezier curves, with error and corner angle options, support for tablet pressure, drawing aligned or perpendicular to a surface, tapering, redo operator and calling from Python.
But wait, there’s more!

• Edit-mode undo memory optimizations, allowing around 5X-15X memory savings
• New N-Gons support for decimate modifier with double precision optimizations
• New decimate edit-mode tool and dissolve tool to remove vertices re-fitting surrounding handles
• Path select can now also select regions using the Fill Region option
• New “Snap Selection to Active” option
• New options for bevel modal operations, to change the profile (bevel shape) or number of segments, with mouse movements or numeric input to set the value

Cycles Render Engine

• Optimizations: Several memory savings & speedups, support for CPU groups
• GPU rendering: support for GTX NVIDIA 10×0, improved support for GTX 980 Ti and Titan X, memory improvements for CUDA & OpenCL
• Better Subdivision & Micro Displacement experimental feature improved
• Smoke volume support for Velocity and Heat attributes
• Fluid simulation mesh support for motion blur and motion vectors
• Point Density textures now support vertex color, weight and normals

Current Blender Version

The Blender Foundation and online developer community are proud to present Blender 2.78a, released September 30th 2016! This release aims to be a very stable one, so that developers can focus better on Blender 2.8 work. Here are some of the highlights:

• Spherical Stereo images rendering support for VR
• Grease Pencil is now a full 2D drawing & animation tool!
• Viewport Rendering improvements
• New Freehand curves drawing over surfaces!
• Bendy Bones, powerful new options for B-Bones
• Alembic support: import/export basic operators
• Cloth Physics: new Dynamic Base Mesh and Simulation Speed option
• New Add-ons, individual preferences, Python APIs changes, and a lot of new & updated add-ons!
• Many more features, improvements and the usual huge bug-fixes list

The update Blender 2.78a was released on October 26, 2016. That release has 69 important bug fixes.

Blender Commercial

Cicero Moraes is a freelance modeler/animator from Mato Grosso, Brasil and he has recently created a series of TV commercials for a local petroleum company. One commercial, the Desemrenho, stands out to me because of how it showcases Blender fluids.

The 3D parts of the commercials were made with Blender and the post production was done by in Adobe After Effects by the studio, Nova Mídia Produções. Cicero says the studio has recently switched from 3DS Max to Blender and personally he only uses Linux and open source software for his productions.
Cicero likes Blender because it teaches people how to use the primitive 3D forms in correct way (only three or four sides), it is a powerful program that fits on less than 11MB and it is in constant development. Like a lot of Blender users, he is self taught "I never went to an art school or computing design class. I learned all that I use (Blender, Gimp, Perl, Linux etc) alone. The community helped me in ways that I needed. The internet is a very powerful knowledge tool."
For more about Cicero visit his web site (English translation via Google) where you can browse through his many wonderful architectural renderings as well as his traditional drawings and animaitons.

Blender Cloud

The Blender Cloud platform, launched in March 2014 and operated by the Blender Institute, is a subscription-based cloud computing platform and Blender client add-on which provides hosting and synchronization for backed-up animation project files.^[88] It was launched to promote and fundraise for Project: Gooseberry, and is intended to replace the selling of DVDs by the Blender Foundation with a subscription-based model for file hosting, asset sharing and collaboration.^[89][90] A feature of the Blender Cloud is Blender Sync, which provides synchronization between Blender clients for file changes, user preferences and other features.^[91]

Use in Media Industry

Blender started out as an inhouse tool for a Dutch commercial animation company NeoGeo.^[47] Blender has been used for television commercials in several parts of the world including Australia,^[48] Iceland,^[49] Brazil,^[50][51] Russia^[52] and Sweden.^[53]
Blender is used by NASA for publicly available 3D models. Many 3D models on NASAs 3D resources page are in a native .blend format.^[54]

Experience Curiosity: taking a Selfie

NASA also used Blender and Blend4Web to develop an interactive web application to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars.^[55] This app^[56] makes it possible to operate the rover, control its cameras and the robotic arm and reproduces some of the prominent events of the Mars Science Laboratory mission.^[57][58] The application was presented at the beginning of the WebGL section on SIGGRAPH 2015.^[59]
The first large professional project that used Blender was Spider-Man 2, where it was primarily used to create animatics and pre-visualizations for the storyboard department.

As an animatic artist working in the storyboard department of Spider-Man 2, I used Blender's 3D modeling and character animation tools to enhance the storyboards, re-creating sets and props, and putting into motion action and camera moves in 3D space to help make Sam Raimi's vision as clear to other departments as possible.^[60] – Anthony Zierhut,^[61] Animatic Artist, Los Angeles.

The French-language film Friday or Another Day (Vendredi ou un autre jour) was the first 35 mm feature film to use Blender for all the special effects, made on Linux workstations.^[62] It won a prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. The special effects were by Digital Graphics^[63] of Belgium.
Blender has also been used for shows on the History Channel, alongside many other professional 3D graphics programs.^[64]
Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells, which was partly produced in Blender by the Belgian studio Digital Graphics, has been nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Animated Feature Film".^[65]
Plumíferos, a commercial animated feature film created entirely in Blender,^[66] was premiered in February 2010 in Argentina. Its main characters are anthropomorphic talking animals.
Special effects for episode 6 of Red Dwarf season X were confirmed being created using Blender by half of Gecko Animation, Ben Simonds. The company responsible for the special effects, Gecko Animation, uses Blender for multiple projects, including Red Dwarf.^[67] The episode screened in 2012.^[68][69]
Blender was used for both CGI and compositing for the movie Hardcore Henry.^[70]

Integrator

The integrator is the rendering algorithm used for lighting computations. Cycles currently supports a path tracing integrator with direct light sampling. It works well for various lighting setups, but is not as suitable for caustics and some other complex lighting situations. Rays are traced from the camera into the scene, bouncing around until they find a light source such as a lamp, an object emitting light, or the world background. To find lamps and surfaces emitting light, both indirect light sampling (letting the ray follow the surface BSDF) and direct light sampling (picking a light source and tracing a ray towards it) are used.^[34]
There are two types of integrators:

1. The default path tracing integrator is a pure path tracer. At each hit it bounces light in one direction and picks one light to receive lighting from. This makes each individual sample faster to compute, but typically requires more samples to clean up the noise.
2. The alternative is a branched path tracing integrator which at the first hit splits the path for different surface components and takes all lights into account for shading instead of just one. This makes each sample slower, but reduces noise, especially in scenes dominated by direct or one-bounce lighting.