I thought this thread is about decoupling these functionalities and not kill one of them. Face dots have advantages if you want to quickly select some backfaces without also touching faces at the front. I’m pretty sure thats impossible without face dots.
Yes, it is, but Blender is the only 3D app out there that uses such concept as face dots, yet people have been doing high end professional work with all the other 3D apps for years, even without face dots.
I use Blender daily for a while now, after using Softimage and 3ds Max for almost 11 years, and I realized that selecting both front and back faces, then turning the view around and deselecting the front faces to be left with back faces only is still much faster solution than the face dot workflow. Simply because such specific scenario only happens extremely rarely, yet the Xray workflow requires you to constantly keep switching xray mode in the cases that are not rare, but rather very frequent.
In fact, face dots will not even help you that much, because if you select any larger amount of faces than just a couple, you will have to draw the selection box, and you will inevitably contain front face dots within the box along with the back facing ones. Face dots are great idea on the paper which translated absolutely horribly into actual practical use case, which is probably the reason why there are no people requesting anything like that for any other 3D apps out there.
That being said:
I was sure there would be people complaining they are gone, so I proposed a solution which would not only preserve the Xray and face dot workflow, but also keep it as default, so out of the box, Blender behavior would be exactly the same as it was up until now. It would work something like this:
This mockup proposal was rejected by William as “Too much UI clutter”… go figure 
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I am with you in this point. I wouldn’t care that much if they are gone, for the reason you said, they can not be found anywhere else and most times their advantage isnt there. But if they stay, I am sure i would use them here and there, and then I would like to be able to differentiate them more easily than its possible right now. With the current implementation of the xray mode thats quite hard to do, especially the viewport content is no longer moving it’s sometimes really hard to separate front face dots from back face dots. I don’t know how much more luck you will have trying to convince the devs to remove them at all. Because of that I found the idea to decouple them better and easier to reach as a goal. And why bill rejected that proposal is a bit mind boggling to me.
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Yeah, while I personally would not mind having the dots completely gone, I was sure developers would not be up for that because backwards compatibility, so that’s why I never proposed removing them. All I wanted was that they are not mandatory for occluded face selection. I assume they would be removed sooner or later anyway, if the option was decoupled, because people would most likely stop using them.
When I started using Blender, I thought they actually somewhat made sense, but as soon as I got into some serious, heavy duty modeling, such as:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/x2EnX
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RLl2r
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4b3N2
then I realized just how much time I waste every day constantly mashing the Xray hotkey on and off. Even most essential things like switching to orthographic side view first require an xray toggle press before I can safely perform a mesh element selection without accidentally moving only part of what I wanted to select.
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Agreed. What I personally don’t like about them most is what William said about your ui proposal. They add that much clutter to the viewport that in complex scenes its really really hard to differentiate the geometry parts.
I just made an account to talk about this one issue. It’s incredible that Blender devs haven’t done anything about this yet. This is easily my most frustrating issue with Blender right now. No other 3D DCC app forces you between face selection and face-dot-selection-mixed-in-with-XRay-shenanigans-to-select-backfaces. As it is, it is mentally tiring to fight againt Blender to select a couple components.
"Just please let us select the polygons [how] we want. No bullshit xray mode, no bullshit face dots, no bullshit semitransparent scene, just ability to select everything inside the selection box."
Really, it’s exactly like that @LudvikKoutny . Where did William talk to you? Can I vote your idea up, if it helps in anything at all? A considerate amount of people have already expressed their concern on this.
To Blender devs: keep those features if you want them, but don’t force it upon everyone, because it’s not a smart way to work. Several artists have laid the evidence in this thread - complex scenes become a nightmare to work with. Setting the XRay value to 1.0 does nothing to solve this, and shouldn’t be the solution either. I am personally modeling a simple sub machine gun at the moment, and already during the blocking process I am having to redo operations several times because some components were not selected properly. Many of my peers have expressed their frustration on this too, saying they won’t pick Blender up until “they drop the pincers you need to select things at the moment”
Please allow us to decouple the XRay feature from the Select Visible option. As for face-dot selection, leave it as an alternative way of selecting faces (regardless of XRay being on/off - why should it matter? These are very different elements and shouldn’t be linked), or at the very least allow people to select things without that.
We are not suggesting anything that would go against other users’ preferences - simply allow us the option to decide for ourselves what selection style to choose.
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On blender.chat. Feel free to hit him up there too, but I had very little success. It was impossible to explain to him why this matters. I still waste literally hours every week because of this design flaw 
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Was any request submitted in the Right-Click Select website? If not, I am willing to create one. This needs to reach them from as many places as possible.
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Why? I think that it’s necessary for a lot of user is obvious
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Sure, go ahead, but it’s not like the developers visit that site often, so it probably doesn’t have any more weight than it does here.
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Found an already-existing suggestion which aligns with what is being said in this thread:
Please vote&comment for this so as to try and let our voices be heard through another channel. This suggestion doesn’t mention the removal of face-dot-selection during XRay mode, but I feel like it’s a more realistic approach to prioritize certain changes over others. @LudvikKoutny If you’d like, I feel like it’d help to paste this RCS link in your first post, so that users who enter this thread for the first time (like I did) can quickly see this and give their vote, since this comment may pass unnoticed by some.
I also encourage others to keep this thread alive, even if it’s just to release some steam. From what I’ve seen of this matter, it seems like whoever would be in charge of changing this will not consider this unless they are swamped by requests of the same ilk from multiple sources.
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+1 for this feature.
Not to beat a dead horse, but throwing a backwire_opacity slider into the shading popover could be a decent short-term solution.
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Not at all, it does not accomplish almost anything:
- Face dots are still used for face selection
- Face dots still show in face mode
Selection mode constantly switching between face area and face dots depending on if Xray is on or off is the BIGGEST issue of this whole problem.
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This is very old, poorly worded and half assed proposal from 2.79 times. Definitely not going to paste this one up. It fails to describe importance of selection method not changing, which is currently the biggest issue.
I see your point, and agree with you. If Face-dot could be removed from XRay, I believe that would solve everything, right? We could work always in XRay mode at full opacity, and with a python script lower the opacity level if we wanted to see through things. Am I correct in this?
Well, mainly it’s not about displaying face dots, but about using them for selection.
The transparency should not be achieved by a python script, but simply by switching to wireframe mode like in other apps, but another problem is the fact that transparency of wireframe mode is directly tied to Xray mode.
Third problem is that once Xray is off but you can select through, it’s often very hard to select some edges, because Blender has this really stupid way of selecting edges where edges are sometimes selected by overlap while other times selected by containment based on some very loose rules.
This whole Xray stupidity has grown so deeply inside of Blender it’s now getting quite hard to fix.
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Yes the selection type is the main thing thats important here.
But as face dots make no sense if the selection mode is set to be no longer limited to having them inside the selection area but the face itself, they should also no longer be displayed, also to differeniate the modes better. And with dense meshes they are quite annoying.
So the new selection setup should definitely include separate options if it is based on dots or faces and if it selects through or not.
Yes, as I already posted, something like this would solve it:
By Xray overlay I mean transparency in the solid shaded mode as well as face dots. Wireframe mode should remain transparent, unlike now where it doesn’t have occluded wire lines if Xray is off.
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