Normal selection scheme

Hi,

is there any way to set up normal logical selection scheme for blender? It’s starting to drive me crazy how many things i have to do and how many buttons i have to press in order to perform so incredibly frequent and elementary task as selection.

By default, blender has some sort of additive selection, and deselection is performed by hitting A key. Also, to initialize box selection, one needs to press a key as well. So something like rearranging even slightly more complex node network can turn to complete hell of excessive mouse clicks and B and A key hitting, while in any other normal software, one can simply box select anything using LMB, then click and drag to move selection, and deselect by clicking into an empty area or performing another box selection. Additive selection is only performed with modifier key (shift for example).

I am sure there must be a way to somehow set up normal selection scheme within blender.

Here’s my setup (Input > 3D View > 3D View Global):
LMB and drag > Border select (always additive)
Shift-LMB and drag > Lasso select (additive)
Ctrl-LMB and drag > Lasso select (subtractive)


And yes, selecting in Blender is a major annoyance sometimes.

I have a similar if not the same setup. If you don’t have extend enabled for the box selection you then only have to LMB drag on an empty space to deselect everything

Hmm, thanks…

I will do some custom setup settings to see if i can bring it down to bearable level. The problem here is, though, that this applies only to 3D view… so the painful setup process will have to be repeated for all of the editors i am afraid.

Hi,

so i found the way, partially.

I was able to map LMB to perform selection but not additively, and to add selection with shift pressed, and subtract selection with Ctrl pressed. But the big problem is it only works for lasso mode, which is a lot less comfortable than border selection mode.

Does anyone have any idea why lasso has deselect property, while border does not?

This is my setup so far:


So i do not need to press so many keys (actually i dont have to press any at all) when doing as basic task as selection. But the problem still remains, that lasso selection is lot more clumsy and slower than border… There must be a way to add deselect property to border selection.

I have a custom setup that makes Blender somewhat in line of Silo/Maya.
Main things are ALT-navigation, LMB-centric, Silo-Tweak, Silo-SculptBrush Size/Strength, and (somewhat) normal selection schemes.

I haven’t shared my setup because of a nasty selection bug that I was able to properly track/report only recently (fixed), and my inability to setup the knife tool to work properly with ALT-navigation. But currently everything is in pretty good shape.

Any interest in this setup?

This is incredible. I think I like it. But I do lose the ability to click-drag the selection. That’s alright; I normally use G key anyway.
And by the way, what is the ‘Tweak’ option under ‘Map Type’?

We were posting at the same time I guess, haven’t seen this post at the time.
Yeah, I have both lasso and border setup with add and deselect, and deselect when empty drag.

I’ll create a new thread where I can share my setup.
I need to cleanup a couple of things and write up an info on some of the main hotkeys I had remapped. In the meantime if you want to try it out PM me.

Edit:
I thought I had border setup like that, apparently not. I’ll have to take a look at that.
I do have BorderSelect - Deselect, but not Add.

Edit:
Got it working in ObjectMode.
For Edit Mode it would conflict with my LoopSelect Hotkeys, so I’ll have to think that through on how to solve it.

Anyone interested can grab my setup in this thread. Some of the main hotkeys are posted there.

This is the combination of settings for BorderSelect to have Add/Subtract. In my settings from the provided link you can have an in-depth look into it.
http://edge-loop.com/images/blender/BorderSelect.jpg

Holy cow, it works! Thanks a lot!

This definitely should be default for blender. Current default selection scheme doesn’t bring any efficiency or flexibility to the table, it just makes selection (task you do dozens of times a minute) take a lot more effort than it should. :slight_smile:

I’m glad the screenshot was of help and you were able to configure it. If you are like me that’s probably going to be a huge UX boost for you.

I’m gonna be a broken record here … but if you like that, try my setup maybe you’ll find more things that you like that you don’t have to use as is, but can give you a starting point to configure Blender to your liking.

I cant stress this enough:
Wazou Pie Menus
Wazou Right Click Pie
… in my opinion, some of the best things on UX front that happened in Blender.
Both are included in my setup. Although slightly older versions and slightly modified. Definitely check out the originals!

Thanks again. I will first try to explore some more defaults in blender and see if they are productivity obstacles before i start to do some heavy modifications though :slight_smile: Since i am not so experienced with blender yet, i prefer to change things only when really necessary for now, so i won’t accidentally break some hotkey map dependencies (which is really hard not to do in Blender).

Right now i reassigned numpad . key to F key, as i found it quite annoying to have to travel my left hand over entire length of keyboard every time i want to center view on selection.