3.52.0

Quad remesh with QuadriFlow (#1090)

Retopology can now rebuild a mesh as clean, field-aligned, all-quad topology. Triangle pairing, which keeps the existing vertices, is still the default.

• Keeps your work. Textures are re-baked onto a new UV atlas for every material slot, and a detail normal map carries the original's surface relief. On a rigged mesh, bone weights are copied from the closest point on the original surface, so it stays rigged and animates as before.
• Keeps the form. By default the remesh aims for 0.6× the input triangle count, follows sharp creases and puts more quads where curvature is high. On a Mixamo character this cut the mean distance from the original from 0.47% to 0.17% of the model's size; fingers, facial features and small props survive. Every run reports how far the result is from the original.
• Robust on messy meshes. Seam-split vertices are welded first. Non-manifold meshes are rebuilt through a voxel pass before remeshing. If an attempt fails, it retries once with simpler settings.
• Where to find it:
  • GUI: Material Mode → Mode Tools → Quad Retopology → QuadriFlow remesh. It runs in the background with a progress bar and Cancel, and is one undo step.
  • CLI: qtmesh retopo model.fbx --algo quadriflow [--target-faces N] -o clean.fbx
  • MCP: retopologize with algo: "quadriflow"
• Image-to-3D: remesh a generated model by running Quad Retopology on it. Generation itself now removes degenerate triangles by default, and the TRELLIS.2 texture picker goes up to 8192 px.
• Export as FBX or OBJ to keep the quads; glTF has no quad primitive and re-triangulates them.
• QuadriFlow (BSD-3) runs as a separate qtmesh_quadriflow helper that ships with every package (Windows, macOS, .deb, Snap, Docker), so a QuadriFlow failure can never take the editor down. Licence notices ship alongside it.

Fixes

• FBX exports no longer face backwards. Since 3.37.1 every FBX export came out mirrored, so a character re-imported facing away from the camera, and the direction flipped again on each round trip. FBX now round-trips exactly, and every export format keeps the source orientation.
• A remeshed model no longer renders dark in the viewport.

Pose mirror and left/right bone pairing (#559, #1088)

The editor now detects left/right bone pairs, so you can mirror poses, bone selections and skin weights across the rig.

• Naming conventions. Recognised out of the box: _l/_r, Blender .l/.r, Left*/Right*, *_left/*_right, 3ds Max Biped side tokens and camelCase affixes. You can add your own regex rules, and they take priority over the built-ins.
• Pairing report. Lists the pairs, the centre bones, bones that are side-named but have no partner, and naming collisions.
• Mirror skin weights across the X, Y or Z plane. Weights copied from the partner vertex move onto the mirrored bone, so a hand-tuned left arm carries over to the right.
• Pose mirroring in the Pose Library understands every convention above. It now keeps scale instead of negating it, so mirroring twice gives back the original pose.
• Where to find it:
  • GUI: Animation mode → Skeleton panel → Mirror / Left-Right
  • CLI: qtmesh rig <file> --mirror-info [--json] and --mirror-weights [--plane x|y|z] -o <out>
  • MCP: bone_pairing_report, mirror_bone_selection, mirror_skin_weights

Gesture animations and finger articulation (#1089)

• New salute, point and clap gesture templates for the motion library.
• Hand articulation across the authored motion set: grip, finger spread, per-finger overrides and explicit joint poses, covering 30 finger joints.
• The wave gesture now has a lower, more bent right-arm pose with revised hand articulation.
• The motion-authoring guide documents the gesture and hand-pose controls.