Unfocused passengers, who are travelling “there”, I guess.
I’m saying, as a joke, that I asked some devs. That they were just waiting around for someone to bump the thread saying things like “fOcuS” and “ASAP” to get their act in gear.
4 Likes
There was times when it used to work btw.
1 Like
Say what? The dev’s don’t add this feature!?
any update from the dev ?
For the latest update see:
That’s the status as of now. No official Blender devs involved still apart from some feedback from @JulienKaspar 
2 Likes
Any news on this? This has been request in 2018, and has nearly 400 replies. It’s almost 4th anniversary and nothing happened.
We have whole new UI, whole new procedural modeling system, whole new hair system, yet we still can’t get ability to select mesh elements properly?
3 Likes
The long awaited patch on this subject was submitted by @lcas yesterday. You can check it out here: ⚙ D16232 Automatic X-Ray
It is the bare-bones implementation of Auto-Xray. We hope that the Blender developers will contribute in the discussion moving forward on the subject. The aim here was to submit a patch that has the highest chance of landing in Blender. Additional features may be possible - and were discussed here: ⚙ D16232 Automatic X-Ray - but that would really require involvement from the core devs with regards to UI choices, etc.
Tagging @pablovazquez and @JulienKaspar, would really appreciate it if the both of you could give feedback on the patch and moving forward with implementing additional features.
And thanks again @lcas for his continued effort on the selection features and doing all the coding work. 
4 Likes
This doesn’t seem to be related to the original request. The patch you linked just makes mesh transparent when selecting. It does nothing in a way of making users able to select faces by their area, and not face dots.
The name of the thread is literally “Decoupling x-ray and limit selection to visible”, as in making the style in which the objects are drawn in the viewport independent from the way selection tools behave.
1 Like
That’s a tangential issue from this topic. Lcas is working on that as well.
I’m really hoping this gets approved finally!
2 Likes
@Justo so do I! I think that a lot of people are eagerly awaiting for this feature to make it to master. Perhaps they are even waiting for it to be included before actually switching to Blender.
My fear is though, that with a lack of direction from the core developers, this may still remain in limbo in the foreseeable future… The main comment on the merge request was about the design, yet most of the design was already thought out for all of the selection features. It’s a shame really. This really needs involvement from the Blender devs in terms of the design so they can approve the merger.
3 Likes
I have to apologize for being skeptical about @lcas 's experiments. While the complexity of the test patches he did seemed excessive to me, the final solution he came up with is absolutely brilliant:
https://developer.blender.org/D16282
The patch linked above manages to implement both select through, requested by many, as well as directional selection, requested by many. And it does so in such a smart way that it has all the flexibility, yet minimal impact on the UI complexity. It’s just so smart.
If this doesn’t get approved, I can’t imagine anything better that could.
4 Likes
I try to do as much as I can think of for my custom build, and see how things work. The first diff I made a few months ago was a catchall to see what sticks, and to give select through at least the chance at another look. For this diff, and any others I make, it’s about making it fit in as much as I am able.
Just to be clear, that patch doesn’t do select through, it just changes selection behaviour while respecting select what you see. It does clarify things a little where select through could be re-evaluated as an enhancement to X-Ray , which is what it really is. I don’t know how likely that is, but you never know.
Select through and auto xray could added be to the keymap, or to viewport shading, or as a popover for the xray button. Toolsettings is also possible. Where and how that goes is what I will think about when I make a design doc.
2 Likes
It’s still a great step towards it. But just to be sure I understand it correctly - if I enable X-ray (so that I now see also the occluded faces), and have let’s say Box Selection Face property set to “Touch” in the keymap, would I perform a select through? Or would it still select only the unoccluded faces, even though I can see occluded ones as well, thanks to Xray transparency?
If the former is the case, then combining it with auto-xray, which can already be easily done on addon level would indeed make a lot of sense. You would get the useful visual aid, but only for the duration of the drag, so you would not have to mash the Xray toggle buttons so many times a day.
If you can see it, and it is inside the selection area as defined by whatever is chosen in the keymap, it will be selected (hopefully)
X-Ray enabled with ‘Touch’ for face/edge works the same as kio’s patch when select through is enabled, except you have to look at xray shading and can’t turn off facedots.
2 Likes
Yes, that’s perfect then, because:
A. Making a performant per triangle overlap testing in Python is very difficult, so the Touch mode was up until now impossible to implement as an addon in a performant manner. Your patch solves it
B. It also makes your Auto-Xray patch make more sense in the context.
So this is still great, because you’ve solved most of the main issues. And even if Auto-Xray did not make it in for whatever reason, that’s something that can luckily be done on Python addon level. But hopefully, these selection properties combined with the Auto-Xray will be perfect combo, because it will solve all the issues without breaking the paradigm.
To anyone still defending the face dots - what’s your workflow of reliably selecting uneven ngons in UV editor?
How am I supposed to get work done when I am unable to even select faces in the UV editor half the time?
1 Like
Islands has contours accessible in vertex selection.