It merges vertices closer together than a given threshold
4 Likes
Agreed, considering that the high quality and speed of the boolean modifier these days makes this far more important than it was, which the lack of stood in the way of a Mesh Fusion type workflow.
1 Like
I hope the Weld modifier will help solve the issue where the Mirror modifier doesn’t always properly weld vertices together at the center of your object mesh and creates lonely verts artifacts somtimes. 
3 Likes
Notes for meeting of Monday, 16 December 10:00 CET / 9:00 UTC on #blender-coders on blender.chat . (details ).
2.82 status
- Mantaflow will land today 16 December 2019.
- Bcon 2 will be in effect after Mantaflow lands. Dalai Felinto will notify bf-committers and update necessary pages to reflect new status.
- In Bcon2 note that
masterbranch is open for fixes and agreed improvements only. New work is to be conducted in feature branches. - Bcon2 will last until 9 January 2020.
Other issues
- Jeroen Bakker requests comments for T72007 -
Design: EEVEE Compositingtask - Jeroen Bakker will work with Sebastian Parborg on LANPR patch review.
- Dalai Felinto will post list of people to contact for issues with dev or infra for duration of the holiday season.
Changes / New Features
Cycles
- Custom render passes are now supported. They are added in the Shader AOVs panel in the view layer settings, with a name and data type. In shader nodes, an AOV Output node is then used to output either a value or color to the pass. ( Lukas Stockner )
GPencil
- Simplify options have been inverted. ( Antonio Vazquez )
Gizmo
- Add gizmos for translation, rotation and scale transforms in UV. ( Campbell Barton )
- Add view aligned gizmo for shear. ( Campbell Barton )
Keymap
- Added remesh shortcuts, support for context menu PC keyboard key, and support cycling for all tool shortcuts. ( William Reynish )
Shader nodes
- Add interpolation modes to Map Range node. ( Charlie Jolly )
- Noise and wave distortion now work uniformly instead of diagonally. ( Bartosz Moniewski )
UI
- Brush settings were overhauled. ( William Reynish )
Universal Scene Description
- Simple USD exporter added. ( Sybren Stüvel )
Weekly Progress Reports
17 Likes
More render passes for Eevee, I like it!
I vote for the Multi pass rendering implementation as it has no noticeable performance impact when rendering viewport. Eevee stould stay as real time as possible.
I would like a seperate shadow pass and not have mixed in the light pass ( as it is in the current PoC implementation ).
This sounds interesting:
10 Likes
Not directly related to Monday Meetings, but Dfelinto is making it clear that the BCon2 feature cutoff will be enforced more strictly than it used to be, as part of the initiative for higher quality development.
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2019-December/050370.html
Many features made in the last minute. While it is exciting to see, this is
far from ideal. Not only this adds extra stress to our team (kudos for the
reviewers), it also leads to less tested features. They are also
severely under-documented.Some of this is due to legacy projects that have been dragging for too long
and organized in huge patch changes. Moving forward I hope we can give the
projects a more manageable structure [2]. We are trying this with VR
(postponed by the way), and the USD project [3] (just in). Things working
well I would like to roll this out to the other new and existing projects.
In a way, some releases will be a little lighter on features, but the intent is to make sure everything is production-ready come release day.
7 Likes
Hmm, they only had a ~2/3 week window to commit new features. If there are a lot of last minute features and stress, maybe the release cycles are too fast. -shrug-
7 Likes
2 to 3 weeks = 237 new Sculpt Mode commits by Pablo, 24 other Blender commits by all other developers. 
4 Likes
To be fair, other Dev’s are doing a lot more work in the bug tracker and merging other people work.
he me look like the star of the show but he is not the only one …
8 Likes
I absolutely agree. Just couldn’t resist the little joke. 
2 Likes
Short release cycles have been very successful in many areas. It is important to be strict and only include what is advanced enough. As the cycles are short, it is usually not a big deal if a feature is postponed as the next merge phase is not too far away.
With more time between releases, the risk is higher that “under active development” stuff gets included. That’s why I disagree with you.
1 Like
I recall back in the 2.4x days that the BF tried longer release cycles (as long as six months), the conclusion was the release builds were not objectively of a higher quality as far as bugs and usability was concerned.
One of the reasons for shorter cycles right now is ensuring that patch makers won’t have to wait near as long to get a review for inclusion into master, as making them wait several months is not a good way of ensuring they remain onboard with development.
3 Likes
Yes, I remember that. Later on, they switched to shorter release cycles. But due to the low number of full time developers, it became an overhead as far as I remember.
It is generally seen as good practice nowadays to have short releases, unless there are strong reasons not to do it. As you mention, in the case of Blender, the patches clearly play an important role here. However, it doesn’t seem optimal yet. I guess, it either takes a little more time to get through the pile and end up with a more suitable amount, or they may have to make some adjustments to the whole process.
There is no best solution at this point I guess and raising concerns among the developers is important to make everyone aware of the upcoming difficulties.
blender 2.8x begins to have the stabilization and solidification phase to be production ready …
new features at the level of large projects will begin to decrease …
A phase of better organization of what already exists will probably begin, this will come with user feedback as they test the tools workflow …
I am not convinced that the number of new features will dramatically decrease. At least, I believe it is going to be higher than ever before on average. Right now there are plenty of patches that need to be reviewed and merged which brings in lots of new functionality.
After that, with the number of full time developers, it is reasonable to assume we are going to see more changes and new features than in the past. This is going to be a huge internal challenge.
1 Like
The only part about this BCon I found disappointing was that both Face Groups and Vertex Color Painting in Sculpt Mode weren’t added in time. I would have liked to see at least one of them implemented for this version, but oh well. Better luck next time I guess!
4 Likes
my mistake, I meant big projects that take many months, not small projects, those will be there all the time.
If I have to think about the predictable ones in sight, we have everything nodes, animation 2020, and what else? … maybe a layered texturing-material-painting system (similar to substance) (I’m not sure, I see it more a work of reorganization of the ui and little else, but I could be wrong)
they are not many …
HALLELUJAH!
2 Likes
I expect that widgets are going to be pushed. They aren’t fully integrated at this point and that’s why I would consider them being a large project to make them shine. There is also the Blender Asset Manager. Vulkan is likely another one. At the Blender conference, Ton also the the audience vote for two feature I think. I can’t remember what those were, but they didn’t sound like small and trivial ones.
There is a lot going on or planned. The difference between large and smaller projects is also somewhat blurry. It is quite usual that larger projects can be split up into multiple smaller ones.
I get your point and two years or even one year ago I would have agreed with you. Now, I am not anymore sure. It is fantastic being unsure or disagreeing about this kind of argument 