@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaking of a general technique, facedot selection type is beneficial during working with tiny/narrow/overlapping polygons and face aerial selection type is beneficial in bash selections (they are both useful but in mutually exclusive cases).
Face aerial selection type is not presented in Blender UV yet, but islands selection which is typical for UV editing is available.
If your question is: could someone please make me a select through version for Blender without facedots? Then you should have asked that — or rather just download Lcas build here: X-Ray selection experiments build - #112 by lcas
No complaining, only constructive feedback and a “thank you” allowed. He keeps progressing to the point where he is ready to create a design doc and several patches.
I would like to add my own 2 cents about the lack of selecting through the mesh without xray or wireframe mode.
I am also really missing it because the process of selecting backfaces/backlines/backvertices is very tedious often requiring to go into xray mode, select vertices and then exiting xray mode because you want better view of your solid mesh when adjusting.
I think the solution is really simple (as far as the UI design goes that is) how to enable select through mesh without adding new elements to the UI.
So we have Xray mode button and we have Xray opacity slider in viewport shading options like this
Now, the slider behaves like this:
0% - all the objects in the scene are see through
100% - only the edited object in the scene is see through
How about this slider only affects the edited objects?
In this way if we enable Xray button it will ALWAYS select through mesh but the actual opacity of the mesh would be controlled with xray opacity slider:
0% - edited mesh is completely see through
100% - edited mesh is completely opaque
This way I can have Xray mode always turned on and opacity slider on 100%. If sometimes I need to select only front faces I can simply turn off Xray mode for the moment.
If for some reason I would like to see through the mesh while modeling I can always
A) lower opacity slider
or
B) go into wireframe mode
I just hope the select through mesh feature isn’t “hardcoded” to the opacity levels inside Blender
Hi.
There was a proposal to separate xray slider into two - object mode and edit mode to avoid frequent using it when switching between edit mode for select but not to see through and object mode to see through in xray mode.
There was a lot of different proposals though, starting from a single checkbox and dipolar systems and ending with a fullfeature setup engine with highest flexibility level.
