Blender - Zip Merge Addon

Merge your geometry together like a zip!

This addon is perfect for merging complex geometry together where merge by distance creates issues. A handy use case is when you are trying to merge seams together on clothing.

A great example is the GIF below. If you were to try and merge these verts using merge by distance you would merge lots of unwanted components. This is a scenario we modelers face time and time again.

Another flawed method to merge this kind of geometry is to bridge faces and remove the unwanted edges, however this will destroy your UVs which is extremely problematic with clothing workflows as you need to blend from the UV mesh to the 3D mesh often.

Zip Merge solves all these problems. Simply merge a few vertices between your mesh islands, select the start vertex and run the ZipMerge operator under the merge menu. Set the desired iterations and away you go.