Blender with Better Selection and More

Lcas · January 20, 2025, 10:24am

Excuse time:

For a few months I’ve been dealing with vision loss in my good eye. Been affecting my work, but I figured I’m just getting older and needing to take my physical fitness seriously. The tunnel vision and temporary shutting-off of my only good eye will work it self out over time, right? Not really, so on Monday I went to the optometrist for the first time in over a decade, figuring they would detect if anything was messed up during my eye exam, see nothing too crazy, and give me a new prescription so I can see better at least while I figure out getting in better shape and all that.

Optometrist says, “Nah, no prescription for you. Something wrong with your optice nerve. Go to urgent care because you might have brain bleeding or a brain tumor, and then see an opthalmologist about what to do after that.” Thought I had fallen asleep in the waiting room at and was having a bad dream. Not having health insurance didn’t help my mood either.

At least I had no symptoms other than the vision loss. I imagine I’d at least be dealing with headaches, dizziness, and confusion if I was suffering from serious brain issues. I roll the dice about skipping the urgent care, and get some sleep. Next day I see an opthalmologist who took good care of me. Not sure this would have been possible without some luck with a cancelled appointment and a personal connection with somebody who used to work there. Unfortunately my opthalmologist told me I had to go to the ER and get admitted before he could treat me. Usually when people have the worst case scenario of this, both optic nerves are affected and they at least have headaches and all that. But there’s no playing around or skipping steps with this stuff, so I have to get an MRI so they can have a look inside my head, and then a lumbar puncture to check my spinal fluid to do some tests for why I have elevated pressure in my head. Have to rule out the brain stuff to get the right type of treatment.

Since I wasn’t exactly dying or anything, I was at the bottom of the triage list. So I’m sitting around in the ER for 12 hours to get admitted to the hospital. Not fun, but it’s really just sitting around for half a day bored to death with a sore lower back and tailbone. Over the next couple days in the hospital I got all the testing I needed to get done and it’s nothing too serious. Just fluid buildup that needs to be dealt with. One of the nurses actually had the same exact thing going on and she helped ease my mind a lot. Have to take some medication to deal with the fluid buildup, and I’ll probably get the vision back I used to have. She had been dealing with migraines, so I’m pretty lucky in that regard.

Anyways, my back is a little sore from the lumbar puncture but that’s about it. Vision still isn’t what it used to be but it’s workable. Over time this medication will hopefully get me back where I was, I’ll have a better idea when I do my followup in a few weeks. In the meantime I might be able to finish updating this build. But it will be slow going until my back is all good and I fully catch up on some much needed sleep.

If you happen to experience any weird vision stuff, take it seriously and get checked out. Don’t wait several months like I did, because it could be seriously bad.

Brick · January 20, 2025, 9:57pm

Damn, that sucks. Having something wrong with your brain must be scary. At least it’s nothing too serious, as you said. Wishing you full recovery.

Lcas · March 19, 2025, 10:45pm

Working on 4.4, a few things have been messed with. Nothing too important, but nice to have stuff that I’m tracking down. Might not be able to figure some of them out, but I’ll upload a 4.4 build by the weekend regardless. After that I’ll update the 4.2 LTS, then probably put 4.3.2 up as well. Not sure how much space gumroad allows, but it should be plenty to keep a handful of Blender versions up.

The stuff I am looking at is pretty typical for a new Blender version. Variables, methods, and files get name changes or straight up removed sometimes. It’s important to keep things tidy and descriptive, so I get it. Overlay Next, and possibly Vulcan is the likely culprit for some of the harder to fix stuff.

So far I know of 3 things, haven’t given the build a thorough test but the important stuff seemed fine.

Turning off select through in Object Mode

This is probably something to do with Vulcan, can’t say for sure but seems very likely. A couple stabs at it did nothing, so I will try to just port everything from 4.3.2 that made it work. If that brings it back, I’ll go from there and try to strip it down to only what I need.

edit 2-
Yeah, something is wrong with the way depth selection works now. I tossed in the older script(s) that were named “view3d_opengl_select” just on the off chance they would magic away whatever they broke about it. No change.

This looks like it is related to Overlay Next. Had thought it was something that got changed during the transition into Vulcan. I’ve tracked down what is going on, but I cannot fix it very easily.

gpu_select.cc → gpu_select_begin_ex

Something about depth selection in the newest version of the draw engine is broken now. It can no longer use GPU_SELECT_PICK_NEAREST, which is what needs to happen to turn off select through in object mode. You can send GPU_SELECT_PICK_NEAREST, but it will just ignore that you’ve done so.

GPU_select_begin_next sets the use_select_next boolean to true, which means everything just uses ALGO_SELECT_NEXT instead of ALGO_DEPTH_PICK like it is supposed to do when you send it GPU_SELECT_PICK_NEAREST.

If I force it to do what it is supposed to, like this:
gpu_select_begin_ex(buffer, input, mode, oldhits, false);

or just set things differently as if I had set use_select_next to false:
g_select_state.algorithm = ALGO_DEPTH_PICK;

Blender will crash when it tries to do a near select in object mode.

This is not something I can figure out in a couple days, and is hopefully being worked on by a dev. This feature is not something that Blender actually does, it’s just something I’ve made use of by playing around in source. So it’s anybody’s guess as far as what is being done to get some feature parity in this case. It’s like wondering if one of the secret menu items at your favorite fast food restaurant is going to still be there under the new ownership.

Next step for this would be to try and throw the draw engine from 4.3.2 at it, just temporarily to see if it works at all, and cross my fingers. If it does actually work, I’d go through and compare the two to see what I could bring over to make everything play nice again. I’ll try that tomorrow if it looks like I have time, otherwise I’m just going to move forward with making a 4.4.0 build without near select in object mode and see what I can do about it after I get my pie menu addon fleshed out a bit.

2. Turning off facedots in X-Ray - DONE

Something to do with Overlay Next. Hopefully just name changes or something, but who knows.

3. Adjusting / disabling header highlights NO NEED

Header highlights were already different in 4.3.2, and if they were like this the whole time I wouldn’t have bothered making them adjustable. It’s very subtle compared to a giant strip at the top of every panel getting brighter.

edit 3-
This doesn’t need to exist anymore because you can change it in Blender now.

edit → preferences → themes → styles → (active) editor outline

Just set the alpha to 0 to disable, or adjust to however you like it. This might be the first thing I’ve done that I can finally get rid of because vanilla Blender has implemented it. Very cool

Lcas · March 24, 2025, 9:49am

All builds for Blender 4.4.0 are up

Object mode can’t disable select through. It’s something about the new draw engine. Will ask around later to see if it’s being worked on.

Other than that it’s the same.

Plans:

1. Compile Mac and Linux
DONE

2. See if Windows ARM can be cross-compiled in x86
NOT AT THE MOMENT

3. Update the gumroad page, and the first post of this thread
Done for now, took way longer than I thought it would. I’ll make some videos this weekend or something.

Create the pie menu addon
Figure out what’s up with the new draw engine being broken for near select. If it doesn’t look like it will be fixed soon, see about including the older engine so you can switch between them. Probably not worth, but if it’s easy enough I could get it done.
Look at making a selection addon. Probably take a while, which is why I’ll be doing the pie menu one first.

The Pie Menu and Selection addons will be included with this custom build. I’ll probably put them on whatever the Blender addon store is for $4.99 each. Unless it’s against the TOS, I’ll mention this custom build that has everything in it.

If the Blender store can accommodate this whole thing, I’ll see about moving it over there as well. I’m assuming they are only interested in addons that can be installed from Blender, meaning a custom build doesn’t really make sense. Either way I’ll ask to see what they think about having a custom build section or something.

Lcas · April 13, 2025, 12:28am

Hey I noticed a couple things and fixed them in the build. Nothing major and didn’t need to recompile since it’s just python stuff. If you have version 4.4.0 you can either redownload the whole thing, or just grab the hotfix and replace 2 python scripts.

More info:

space_view3d.py removes some console warnings. If you use this build in Drag Select Mode = Default, the viewport header would look for a variable that didn’t exist and print warnings in your console.

view3d.py fixes the customizable pie menu for drag select. If you go into Split Mode, turn on some Drag Direction controls, and then go back to Easy Mode where drag controls don’t happen, it will mark different operators as unavailable because it thinks drag select was still enabled.

Lcas · March 21, 2026, 1:53am

Version 5.1 is out.

Select Through is Edit Mode only
Square Select & Wireless Touch are gone.
That’s all for now, details in the first post