Should have this fixed now, checking it out led to finding this bug
It isn’t something that would be noticed unless you are in a debug build, but pretty neat.
Preview build for 3.21. Its a Lite build of RC, will upload the real thing once release probably. I’d appreciate one more check over things if anybody wants to do it.
[PREVIEW BUILD] 321RC Lite Sthru
Autoxray issues should be cleared up, and changed the way mesh element options are presented. Not as straightforward as 3 checkboxes, but it shouldn’t require as much guessing to figure out what to expect.
Planning on putting these options in a popover next to the vert/edge/face button. I had it all finished and setup inside of toolsettings but theres an issue with that for reasons I don’t understand. The viewport TS works fine, but the side panel one doesn’t work. You can make it show up in there fine, but it has no affect on selection. It has to be defined somewhat differently in python to show up, which may have something to do with it. Either way it isn’t there, but I left it in the viewport TS panel just to show what it could work like. Not much difference whether it is in TS or the popover next to the VEF buttons, so feel free to convince me to keep it in the viewport TS. Being in viewport means there’s no rightclick->reset to default, because for whatever reason that isn’t possible.
So, how does it work? It can be as simple as this:
Or as complex as this:
Near Face will change how near faces are selected by box and lasso. Meaning not in X-Ray, and not Select Through, that’s it. This also means circle will never use this because it only has options for “center” or “touch”
“Touch” means the same thing as what has been reffered to as “area” but I changed the wording so it is the same for face and edge (edges are 1-dimensional and don’t have area). It’s also about as simple as it could be described, touch face or edge with the selection area, and it will select the face or edge. Face “area” is less intuitive.
Enclose means you only select faces that are fully inside the selection area.
X-Ray face is the same as near, but for X-Ray shading. It has a “Center” option, which means select any faces whose center is inside the selection area. It does not care if facedots are visible or not. This goes the same for Select Through. I decided to leave it in your hands what the selection will do. If you want to select by invisible facedots, go for it. If you want to have facedot visibility act as your selection toggle, you can set up a python maco to keep them synced up. Shouldn’t be an issue for you guys though, I don’t think anybody who wants to turn facedots off will want to be selecting by them in any context.
Edge works for edges at all times, with and without X-Ray. “Enclose” is the default way blender does it, meaning adaptive, where it will give you only enclosed edges, or if you don’t fully enclose any edges it will give you any edges you touch with the selection area. “Touch” will give you any edges you touch with the selection area.
By default, “Select Through Filter” will be on. This means you can set a separate filter for select through while maintaining X-Ray Face/Edge. If you turn this off, it will just use X-Ray Face and Edge.
“Circle” and “Circle Select Through FIlter” are both off by default, but are there if you want them. It is like the select through filter but for circle. You can have one or both of them, they are separate things. Circle select options are very limited, face only, and you can select by either Touch or Center in X-Ray and/or Select Through. Otherwise it will use either X-Ray (Enclose will fallback to Touch) or Select Through (Enclose will fallback to Touch) depending on what is applicable.
If you are in X-Ray shading, and have Select Through on, both the filter and have it on (header button is lit up) you will get the Select Through filter behaviour despite select through not actually happening (xray is on there’s nothing in the way to select through anymore).
That is a lot of explanation for something that is meant to be simple to understand, but I wanted to make it as simple or complex as is reasonable. All of that while also maintaining default behaviour of both vanilla blender and select through as it was originally designed. Otherwise you’d be forced to use something more complex than you want, maybe you don’t care if select through or circle has it’s own filter. Or you’d have to deal with whatever decision I make for you regarding what I think you might want, maybe you want circle to use face center and box/lasso to use enclosed faces.