Gaia Clary has announced in the official forums that the latest version of Blender, 2.68, now has improved weight painting tools. I’m not familiar with these sort of tools, so I don’t know how much of an improvement they are, Gaia, who does know about these matters seems pretty impressed. Gaia also helps to develop these improvements, so deserves much credit. I’ll embed Gaia’s video explaining the improvements at the end of the post, but this video is aimed at those who already have a knowledge of weight painting.
Gaia and fellow colleagues have worked on development with Blender to make it more useful for the Second Life community, for example they have been instrumental in seeing that Collada support is maintained and their work also saw options mentioning Second Life, coming to the Blender client.
However they don’t do this alone and Gaia thanks the main devs too for their assistance, so it seems there’s a very good working relationship at play, which is positive for Second Life going forward.
Version 2.68 also has other improvements over previous versions of Blender.
Under Modeling they list:
Improved bridge tool to bridge multiple loops at once, subdivision, surface blending and bridging face regions. New grid-fill tool filling a grid from edge loops, X mirror and projected proportional editing, snap to symmetry, face split option for dissolve, vertex connect cut across faces.
Under usability, as well as the improved weight tools, they list:
Mask modifier for sequencer strips, 2D image paint more consistent with 3D painting, better key shortcuts display, quick enabling and disabling of multiple layers or visibility, auto indent for multi-line Python statements.
Some of these improvements will improve matters for Second Life creators, some of them are out of their scope but may be useful for other projects. I’ll leave you with Gaia’s video on the improved weight paint tools: