Don't know the answer to that yet. In reality, weldments is early stages and whether it makes it into v29 or a follow up is unknown. There's a lot to figure out, multibody or assembly approach included. Once we have a direction, we'll be able to be more explicit.
Weldments?
Parts can have multiple lumps(bodies), which are referred to as pieces. The API has enough topology information exposed to build a multibody addon or tool. AD wasn't designed for multibody therefore features such as design explorer providing the edges, faces and vertices collections and other features like check part can cause user confusion in the context of a multibody design. Lumps(bodies) automatically merge when they touch making a combined piece. Multibody is an abstraction on top off single body or whatever the API calls it. A multi-lump Alibre part when exported is the same result as what Big CAD produce just without internal attributes/settings.
Multibody has nothing to do with weldments. When you say weldment that could be a separate environment like sheetmetal, a Weldment tab on the ribbon in parts and/or assemblies or a plugin like Frame Builder. To add multibody, Boss and Cut features would need to support it. They currently don't support pieces(lumps).
When you pattern geometry those are pieces (lumps/bodies).
Sketch tools would need to be updated to support regions, that would allow you to make multiple bosses or cuts by selecting regions in a single sketch. The way check part, properties and other features work would need updates:
AD doesn't leverage lumps, so how would a multibody system work, what would be different? Is it a new kernel/framework, lib/extension or are lumps getting promoted? If the current tools were updated and expanded to include more complete unified workflows these continuity issues would be resolved. AD API is missing many core features as it is, adding multibody and/or weldments, will these new core features have an API? If more and more new features are added without API access or updates what does that say about the API? Both API and scripting are clearly 0 on the roadmap. I guess that's how it has always been. With Windows 10 end-of-life approaching among other tech. building with Alibre is a step backwards. After the UI overhaul and .NET transition by v32, a 3rd party developer ecosystem might be available (if AI hasn't taken over too much). I understand, if the company is focused on UI and codebase transition, that leaves little left for 3rd party development which is built on the core. Some updates for API and Alibre Script users would be great.
