Modeling

General

• New property in the Shade Smooth operator to enable Auto Smooth. Exposed as Shade Auto Smooth in the 3D Viewport's Object menu and Object Context Menu. (eef98e66)
• New snapping method that snaps transformed geometry to Nearest Face. Expanded snapping options to give more control over possible snapping targets. (011327224e)

Modifiers

• Surface deform modifier can be used when target mesh increases number of vertices. (5f8f436dca)

UV

Note the flipped and overlapping UVs around the nose, and the shear and non-uniform scale for the ears and eyes.

After minimize stretch, the flipped faces are smoothed away. After Average Island Scale with Shear and Scale UV, the ears and eyes now have a nice even balance between the U coordinate and V coordinate.

Four changes help with workflow and improve final UV quality.

• When using UV Unwrap in the UV editor, only the selected UVs will be unwrapped. (c0e4532331)
• Minimize Stretch will now unflip faces. (135e530356)
• Upgrade Average Island Scale with new options, Scale UV and Shear. (931779197a)
• Add new operator, "UV Select Similar". (1154b45526)

In addition, many smaller bugs have been fixed or resolved including:

• Snapping to UV vertices is now done if the cursor reaches a minimum distance. (d2271cf939)
• Improved constrain-to-image-bounds when scaling UVs. (bc256a4507, 4d7c990180)
• Use per-face aspect correction when applying Cube Projection, Spherical Projection, Cylinder Projection and Project From View. (1c1e842879)
• Update size of hitbox for UV axis gizmo so it matches hitbox size in the 3D viewport. (65e7d49939)
• During UV unwrap, pinned vertices will not be merged. (e6e9f1ac5a)
• Improved UDIM support.