in Blender 2.79 I used to have a technique to make meshes have an even/homogenous distribution of vertices. I would start to increase the number of vertices (if necessary) using the "subdivide" or the "remesh" tools. Then I would apply a "remove doubles" (in 2.79, now it's called "merge by distance") with a distance that corresponds to a density I wanted.
The issue is that using the "remove double" would work pretty well in version 2.79, however in recent versions (e.g., 2.92) using the "merge by distance" tends to produce a lot of non-manifold faces.
This can be demonstrated just by using the default cube scene:
- Start with the default scene cube
- Apply a default settings "voxel remesh" (usable from object mode, not from edit mode)
- Apply a "triangulate faces" and a "shade smooth" (that will help visualise the issues in the next step)
- Do a "merge by distance" at 0.2m
- Deselect all and then "select all by trait" - "non-manifold"
As it can be seen, the mesh becomes all messed up.
For comparison here is the result of the equivalent operations in 2.79:
Is this a bug? Is there any workaround for this?
Is there a better way to achieve homogenous vertex density while maintaining manifoldness?
Thanks.