in edit mode - mesh face with lots of little white dots - what does it mean?

In a mesh that I have boolean intersected with another mesh, blender displays lots of little white dots on one of its faces, while in edit mode. What does this mean?

Can you do a screenshot? I could guess at problems but without some slightly more detailed info thats as good as it gets. Could be intersecting faces or something similar (Z-axis fighting, i believe it’s called).

Here’s a screen grab. I noticed it after I had done a boolean intersection. Several new polys were created in the process, but not at the point in the screenshot. Also, this is occurring at the point of a sphere (one that is intersected with another one), if that makes any difference.

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ubergrafik,

That is the active or last selected face. In edit mode, use ctrl tab to switch to face select mode, and select a different face. Now de-select the face and ctrl tab back to vertex mode. Now a different face will have the white dots.

This WAD (Working as Designed).

Best of Luck!

Thanks for that, worked a treat.

That was bugging me, too. Thanks for the explanation.

Are there situations during editing while in vertex-select mode when you’d need to know what faces are selected? Are there blender commands/actions that use selected vertices and selected faces together as inputs?

This is just to satisfy my curiosity. I’m not a cat, so I should be OK.

Are there blender commands/actions that use selected vertices and selected faces together as inputs?

It is possible to have vertex, edge, and face selection (or any combination) active at the same time, by shift-click on the icons in the edit mode header. All the normal edit-mode actions will work on such multiple selections.

is it possible to turn this option off?

the dotted face is annoying me, I know I can reduce the alfa of the dots in the themes, but the last selected face is still showing…

anyone know how ?

I am pretty sure it is built in and you can not change it. Not positive on that. But the reason it is there is because all Blender selection distinguishes between the selection and the active selection. This is because some tools or actions work based on the active selection and the order you select is key to many things in Blender. And so Blender always shows you the active selection which is the last thing selected. I think there are even some tools - can’t remember which ones now - that work based on the last selected face even if it is not selected.

You can get rid of it by selecting another face and then undo and then a.

If I remember correctly, this active face was introduced when they merged edit-mode and face-select mode.

I myself find the active face quite annoying in editmode since as far as I know it’s most of the time totally useless and clutters up my screen.

It also confuses new students of my classes because it’s visually dominant.

Is it useful for any modelling technique?

Haunt

I’m also interested in making the active face less intrusive.
Anybody knows how to do it?
I tried tweaking the GUI colours with no luck.