Blender equivalent to "select similar" in Max

Support Modeling
1

I’m in progress to move to Blender from Max when Blender still in ver. 2.79. During Blender transition from 2.79 to 2.80, and this made my learning pace to familiarized them got a bit prolonged not as i expected as i have to re-learn Blender twice in making this move.
My modeling workflow sometimes is: sketchUp -> Max. I tried to find every every equivalent aspect in Blender of my old workflow ritual in Max (e.g. move polygons into collections and managing colections hierarchy as eq. of grouping some polygons into layers and grouping various objects/ elements and so on).
What i still don’t find is: how to select similar object in Blender just like in Max?
I know that there are Shift-G & Shift-L which are for the same purpose but their result are not quite satisfying as there as i got in Max, for example:

  • When you have many 2D tree in Max (converted from Skecthup), and you want to select them you can just select one or some of them then ->right click-> select similar then boom! all the similar 2D trees selected. This are also working well in many other object (other than 2D) “select similar” case.

But i never got satisfying results using Shift-G and/or Shift-L in Blender to achieve it. I was wondering if there are some ex-Max users here knew there is another workflow to achieve the results i need.

Thanks.

2

Hey,

There is no direct equivalent, however if your meshes all have a common naming convention ( like tree.001, tree.002, tree.xxx ) then you can use the Select by Pattern:

image
and then using the wildcard notation ( an asterix * ) you can select all meshes that have that name:

image
image1290×674 176 KB

If it’s something you use a lot,you could assign the Select Pattern to the Quick Favorite menu.

Dj

1 Like
3

Hi @DamianJ, thank you for your advise. Your suggestion to use “select pattern” with wildcard works for most of what i need to achieve. :ok_hand: :+1:

1 Like
4

@Inpow, I hope you are having a great Sunday and that hopefully this post makes it even greater! I just saw on Blendernation that a group is adapting a visual search algorithm to be included in Blender that finds similar objects through ray casting. It is still in alpha at the moment, but you can sign up to be a tester by following the instructions on the Blendernation post here:

Also, here’s the video of it in action:

1 Like