Blender 2.8 development thread

xrg · May 22, 2018, 1:03am

Ton gave me this response for preselection highlighting several years ago.

Ton:

Selection of faces/edges/vertices/bones/etc in Blender is not “click and guess” but IMHO one of the best working features of Blender - in which we beat other programs still. In 3d views you just don’t have singular selection possible (small elements, overlapping elements, etc). For that reason Blender has a heuristics that includes the distance to mouse, and cycles based on this distance (including on Z depth). If this doesn’t work well, I would call that a bug to solve - and have developers make it more predictable on single/2nd clicks…

Next to that, one of the key design concepts in Blender is to follow the non-modal “Select → Operate” paradigm. Selection is the state, operations the user’s toolbox that should be fast accessible. In other programs (like Maya) they use the “Operator → Select” approach; that means you first set the tool (translate) and then apply that on selections. In such a modal UI a preselect is more understandable to use.