Bumping this thread. This deficiency really costs me time every day. Very often it happens that I forget which mode I am in (Xray or not) and I accidentally perform operation only on mesh element selected from one side, not all sides, resulting in deformed model and having to revert to older save and re-do the work again.
Having constant mental burden of tracking if I am in a mode which allows me to select all faces or not is really tiring. It takes away the joy of otherwise well working fluid modeling workflow in Blender.
Just please let use select the polygons we want. No bullshit xray mode, no bullshit face dots, no bullshit semitransparent scene, just ability to select everything inside the selection box.
Also bumping this thread. I have just started diving into Blender and am really excited about itâs potential as a real powerful tool for many tasks in my pipeline. Coming from 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, as well as other DCCs, this is a pretty basic and expected workflow need for modeling. I was surprised to find that Blender had a similar toggle, but as of the awesome 2.8 update, this was removed. I really think this is a MUST have toggle. It is called âIgnore Backfacingâ in Max, and as someone already pointed out âOnly Select Visible Elementsâ in Cinema. Please bring this back ASAP!
I agree that it should be a separate toggle. For me, ideally it would be something like left mouse button for normal selection (front facing) and middle mouse button for selecting through geometry, but this wouldnât be possible with the way Blender uses the mouse buttons.
I evaluated Blender some years ago for our company, but the UX was so alien, that we switched to Maya (which was a good decision back then). With Blender 2.8 this seems to have changed. It clearly came a long way. But the removal of the âselect back facingâ toggle is a huge regression, in my point of view. Please. Bring it back.
Thanks a lot for this quick reply! This definitely helps when using in âSolidâ mode.
From a UX point of view I still believe that this merge was an arbitrary and strange decision, because now the âX-Rayâ feature leaked into the âWireframeâ and âSolidâ view options, but NOT into âLookDevâ and âRenderPreviewâ. I personally found that confusing. I probably would figured out the intended usage quicker, if the X-Ray button would be be there at all (or only visible in Wireframe or Solid mode).
It looks like it was an animator request to see armatures through meshes.
And developers were opposed to create another button in header for that.
You should not be confused about absence of X-ray slider for LookDev and Rendered modes.
Those modes should give a look similar to render. That does not make sense to use those display modes to look through meshes that are not supposed to be rendered as semi-transparent objects.
For those modes, transparency should be reflect of materials transparency.
Thanks for the explanation. I believe, I will learn to live with that.
And itâs always good to avoid adding new buttons. A minor improvement could be to âhideâ the X-Ray-Button completely when in âLookDevâ or âRenderâ mode.
Well, in those modes, the transparency of objectsâ material is not affected by that.
But the transparency of Faces and Edges overlays in Edit mode are.
So, the slider is not useful. But the button is still useful. At least, in Edit mode.
Created an account just voice my feedback as a modeler interested in learning Blender.
Seeing that Select Visible to Camera was removed was a step backwards and âwanting to avoid adding another buttonâ is a pretty petty reasoning justify it.
To make matters worse, when in solid mode, the marquee selects partially contained polys, but when in X-ray you have to drag through the face center to select it, which makes selecting both sides around curved surfaces a major pain.
Two gifs below. In other programs with that option enable a similar sized drag marquee could have selected around the same polys that I did in solid mode, but would also select the back faces that I wanted. Now it can barely select anything because I have to contain the face center.
Bump. This problem still persists. Thereâs still no way to select geometry without constantly need to switch selection methods between face area and face dots. This really slows down workflow a lot.
This still remains one of the biggest workflow issues in Blender currently and is still unaddressed. This is very frustrating. I spent lots of time a day correcting for all the errors caused by selection method constantly switching on the fly, wreaking havoc when modeling. > : (
Instead of just switching mesh element selection modes, I also need to constantly toggle xray on and off depending on what I want to select. It makes selection very difficult and unnecessarily lengthy process.
Ya guys, turn XRay on, box select, then turn it off again.
Completely intended behavior.
âThese two functions are the same guys trust me, the features were never meant to be decoupledâ
I swear to god there is some random high up guy who just canât be wrong.
Iâd also would love to see this being reworked.
âLimit selection to visibleâ should be available as a standalone feature.
And face area and face dot modes should be decoupled as well.
What Iâd also would like to see, would be a frontface/backface coloring for dots and a xray toggle with a dropdown to control it there directly.
The coloring is not not meant as an alternative for the new face orientation coloring itself. This feature I mean would allow a easier work with selecting faces via dots.
Just wanna chime in on this topic too. An ignore backfacing toggle is standard in every DCC except Blender 2.8 and is much needed.
The only way to do this is set xray mode to 1 and disable âHighlight selected faceâ. Then it works(tested in 2.81) but now you donât have highlighted selected polys.
There are actually two different visibility settings that impact what you see when xray is enabled: xray_alpha for face opacity, and backwire_opacity for occluded wireframe opacity.
backwire_opacity is a bit of an oddball. It isnât accessible through the default UI right now, but it has the proper tooltips and translations for UI integration. Itâs accessed through context.space_data.overlay instead of the usual [panel name].get_shading(context) and setting context.space_data.overlay.show_faces = False disables it in all selection modes.
xray_alpha = 1 and backwire_opacity = 0 lets you select occluded geometry without seeing occluded wires. Combining that with object or material color instead of single, random, vertex, or texture color gives you granular opacity control, with smooth alpha blending instead of alpha hashing.
Xray, or the change of the viewport display is the smaller issue. The bigger issue is that itâs also bundled with face dot selection, which constantly keep switching between two different face selection techniques.
Itâs not as simple solving the transparency problem. The main issue here is constantly changing selection method.
The simplest, and best way to solve this would be simply to somehow âexcludeâ the hit testing code for box/lasso selection only. There must be some code that explicitly tests if the faces within the selection box are visible first before actually adding them to the selection array. For single click selection, selecting only visible elements is still desired, but for box selection, Iâd like a toggle. A toggle, not whole new xray mode.
You are just talking about xray opacity here, you are not taking into account the issue of face selection method being switched from face area intersection to face dot containment.
