Michael,

is there anything planned to add more selection methods in MoI? I'd wish for a ring or loop selection - is something like this planned?
If there is such thing already (as script maybe?) can someone point it out to me?

I have seen the ring around the point pick. Controlled size by either snap radius, active distance or keep active distance I would guess. I imagine this pick area being able to be increased to a large area, then also having a "feathered effect" that can be applied to the perimeter. This would work with a slow "dropoff" of "scale" that the point picker applied to its actions. So like ZBrush, pick in a bunch of points and the one most centered is moved as precise normal, and as the points are further away from pick point, a density is applied to the move and the points start to move in smaller increments (like the way the view button sensitivity works).

Filters can be applied to the shape of the point picker, like a "star", and it would pull a star shape out of a surface. Different feathering methods produce different results. :O

And then my head exploded and I woke up!

fine that you can still post after this incident. :D

What I'd like to have is for example - if I extruded a gear outline to produce a gear - then I want to round/chamfer the edges and have to click on every edge all the way around - there a loop selektion would be helping a lot (I don't dare to dream of selecting every x-th edge along the circumference....).

Hi macray,

>>then I want to round/chamfer the edges

You can select one edge and then drag a selection window from right-to-left or left-to-right in the appropriate view.

Petr

Hi Macray,
Thanks, this morning I used unexplode and seem to be back to normal now...

As peter said, the selection mechanism can have a "types picked" kindof method applied to it. So like the way you do a "drill down" to select an edge (select obeject, then second pick to pick just the edge) when you are in drill down mode, the selection window will pick only those objects. You can use a couple of methods to acheive fairly precise picking, like remember that doing a window drag from the right to the left is like saying, "Pick everything that even intersects into the pick window" and then a normal window drag picks "only objects that are completly in the pick window. This alond with cntrl+shift click to disable object picking to do a window drag in the midst of other objects can pretty much pick anything you need.

FYI

I know about these selection modes and they help a lot but sometimes I wish for more. *dreaming of an ideal world*

Hi macray, yes I do want to add in some additional selection methods in the future like some kind of "chain edges" option.

I'm not sure exactly when that will happen, hopefully sometime in v3.

That's probably a bit too complex to do with a simple script currently.


But like Petr mentioned you can do a window select to target edges after selecting at least one of them first, that can often help a lot.


The other thing is that in some circumstances you can select faces instead as a shortcut rather than selecting edges. Like for example with Fillet instead of selecting edges you can select faces and all the edges that belong to that face will be targeted for filleting.


You wrote:
> if I extruded a gear outline to produce a gear - then I
> want to round/chamfer the edges and have to click on
> every edge all the way around

That one is actually a really good example of where you can use a face selection instead.

So if you have this shape:



If you want to fillet all the top edges, instead of selecting all the edges you can actually instead select the top face like this:



Now when you run Fillet, it will target all the edges that belong to that face for this result:




Also though in this gear example like you mention, window select from the Front or Right side views can also be a good shortcut for grabbing all the edges pretty quickly rather than clicking on every single one individually.


You can also just select a whole object as input to the Fillet command, and that will fillet all of its edges, you don't have to select individual edges for that either.

- Michael

Aw Michael - the gear was an example that I'd chamfer/round the way you described, but it was just used as an example to represent the loop selection for the outer edges... I know how to do this and how to select the edges by right-left and left-right selections, edges and faces. But it was just an example there was no real need to show how this might work.


It is good to know that there are some things like this planned - even if just for some versions further on.
Thank you for the time to answer this.