Elephants Dream movie has resulted in a big Blender development boost
EditBy: Aimed world-wide at media professionals and artists, Blender can be used to create 3D visualizations, stills as well as broadcast and Cinema quality video, while the incorporation of a real-time 3D engine allows for the creation of 3D interactive content for stand-alone playback.
Originally developed by the Company Not a Number (NaN), Blender now is continued as Free Software, with the source code available under the GNU GPL license. It now continues development by the Blender Foundation in the Netherlands.

Key Features:
Fully integrated creation suite, offering a broad range of essential tools for the creation of 3D content, including modeling, uv-mapping, texturing, rigging, weighting, animation, particle and other simulation, scripting, rendering, compositing, post-production, and game creation;
Cross platform, with OpenGL uniform GUI on all platforms, ready to use for all versions of Windows (98, NT, 2000, XP), Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Irix, Sun and numerous other operating systems;
High quality 3D architecture enabling fast and efficient creation work-flow;

Array Modifier
The Array Modifier allows you create procedurally duplicated/merged Objects, to make Chains, Cogs, fractals or even beautiful natural shapes.
Its all fully animatable, with control-Objects defining duplication methods.
Render Pipeline
The new rendering pipeline offers a wealth of new features. It has become tile-based and fully threaded, supporting advanced preview renders, layer-rendering and pass render, with a tight integration to the Compositor.
Material (Shading) Nodes
Currently most 3D suites have some kind of shader editor, typically represented as Nodes or Trees. To easily allow current Materials to become layered or combined, but also to enable a Blender-compatible migration, a hybrid version has been implemented in Blender now. you can free download Blender 2.4 now.