Let me reformulate.
You don’t expect that behavior to work only for transform, move gizmo.
You expect that behavior with extrude, spin, shear gizmos, too.
That is exactly what I am trying to explain. In blender, select tool is a tool like the others.
So, the dissatisfaction of 2.8 design is not related to keymap or lack option.
It comes from the fact that select tools are on the same level of other tools.
if we are coherent, we don’t expect a Topbar only showing one more option to display a gizmo for box select but a Topbar showing box select options + gizmo’s active tool options at same time.
I prefer to say that worked as long as tablet use for 3D was neglected.
Yeah, this is a design fail in my view as well. Selection is special since it occurs in between almost every action.
I’d happily relegate tweak to some keyboard combo, or even just lose it completely from the mouse and always use G, if it meant we could have sane always-on box select. Likewise for the context menu. 0rAngE’s setup kinda does that, but it’s so unlike what we’re used to, devs would have a revolt on our hands if they tried to pass that off as the new LCS defaults
It’s not a design fail, because blender wasn’t designed to work this way. Now we’re at this point it’s just something that hasn’t been adapted to integrate with the brand new active tools workflows.
In blender’s original workflow, any tool can be activated at any time, so there is no need for selection to be singled out, to be overtly special, the design wasn’t an issue. Actually from a design perspective it was a good thing, keeping the selection tools working within the same systems that the other tools use, reusing more common code, keeping things modular and reducing special unique cases.
It’s only a problem now because they’re integrating things onto LMB and the active-tools, they’re trying to adapt blender to a workflow it wasn’t designed for. This new workflow is completely different, you can’t just activate any tool at any time, but it’s assumed you can select things at any time. Blender’s tools weren’t designed for that, give it time to get this new one working.
Oh I’m giving it time. But I can only comment on what’s there now.
I love the blender devs, don’t get me wrong, a more competent, patient, and thick-skinned bunch you’ll be hard pressed to find. But unless you tell them very explicitly what’s wrong and why, they tend to keep their first implementation, or finish before something is actually finished
(Cycles baking, I’m looking at you, with your missing bias, displacement and antialiasing, and laughably clunky UI)
I was thinking that the feature would be really useful if that selection mode/state would only select external faces (in ortho view mainly), this would allow to select external part quickly in a single step and then hide it and have internal part available to work on it.
By the way, I’m not sure if it’s possible to do it in one step on 2.79 anyway, I usually do what I show in the video.
Edit:
is possible with Select Mirror in this case, but I think that are more steps anyway.
And yes, stupidly I took one more step in the video. I was imagining having non-symmetrical more complex geometries than a simple sphere.
It sounds like being able to select external faces would be useful, but I wouldn’t call the operator Phong break.
Though it should also rely on a smart algorithm so it can be useful for more cases than spheres (as many real world objects have somewhat complex shapes).
No, it doesn’t work just like that, this was just a quick demo to replicate yafu’s example.
This selection tool really works on phong angle/break, I can adjust the angle in the settings. So yes, this is useful for million of things.
You don’t actually have any internal faces in your model there, though I suspect you’re just not using that term precisely. (If you were then Select->Non-Manifold would work for you)
You could do that selection in a single step by just doing a circle-select from top-down, though I guess that’s not really what you want either. Or you could use the Select Similar by Perimeter operator.
Anyway, the feature you want, while neat, is unrelated to the one that was discussed. I suggest starting a topic on devtalk and trying to sell it to the devs by making a use case for it.
It looks a bit like the Select Similar by Normal operator except that one compares the face normal to one face, and here you’d want each to be compared to neighboring faces. Maybe that’s a good place to start.
You call it as you want, we are offtopic anyway. But in my view what I request would avoid making mistakes when accidental selecting internal non-visible geometries if you select in solid mode with what you proposed. So if that were possible, it could be an additional option to what you are proposing.
You could certainly cast a ray from each face or face-vertex to see if it hits something, but is this really all you want? Other than that sphere with a hole in the middle, what would be the use case for it?
The thing Thinking Polygons demonstrated happened to work for the example, but it’s really very similar to Blender’s combo of Select Sharp, and then Select Loop Inner Region. I wouldn’t mind having this, but I also suspect it’s not really what you want.
…But perhaps you are right, perhaps one can not in all cases differentiate exactly what is external or what is internal.
I was just trying to figure out some option to avoid making such accidental mistakes with what you propose.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just trying to get you to think of a test that would be satisfying to you before you take the suggestion to the devs. Having a well thought through proposal, generally helps convince them.
Modeled tile patterns, Rubik’s cube, buildings, anything where you might want all outward-facing faces selected but can’t be reached with the Select Linked Flat Faces operator without selecting everything.
What would you do with such a selection once selected? Bear in mind some of the faces selected this way would still be visible from outside, at some angles.
Like if you have a building, the recesses windows are in would be selected because they have something in front of them and the raycast would catch that, but they’re still visible from the outside unless you’re looking at the building at a right angle.
