I’m sorry for the really basic question, but I’ve done some searching and apparently my search criteria are too general or simply just wrong.
Background: I heavily customized Blender to act more like Maya and other apps I am comfortable with. It was great because I was able to get my work done and not fight with a new-to-me interface. But now I want to learn Blender properly (and follow some paid tutorials) so I have reset my settings back to default (except Maya-style navigation and left mouse select - including alt-left rotate etc.)
One thing that I noticed is that I can no longer de-select items by simply clicking on an empty part of the 3D-view. I was able to do this under the Maya preset but searching through the keyboard bindings I am not able to find anything that jumps out at me as being the thing to change.
I would like to modify Blender so that I can once again left-mouse click on empty space to clear the selection. The only thing I have found so far is (De)select all which is assigned to the letter ‘a’. But this toggles the selection off, then the next time it selects all (exactly as advertised). So this doesn’t seem like the right place to make the change.
Can anyone point me to the name of the setting that I need to change to re-enable this ability to de-select by clicking on the empty space in a 3D view?
You can click the arrow to expand the operator, then change the action to Deselect.
I’m not sure why you need deselecting though. If you create a new object for example it’s automatically selected. Especially on an important button like the left mouse click, there’s just many things that could be better used for that button, like left click select or 3d cursor snapping.
To be honest, I am trying to explain why I want to deselect and at the moment (I am not in front of Blender) I can’t explain why I need it. Maybe it is just a security blanket and I should try to work without it. I am just used to being able to do it in every other app that I use and so I feel I need it here?
I read through the two links posted here (by Orange) and they are extremely helpful as well. Again, I am not in front of Blender right now, but I will take a look at the plugin that PLyczkowski released. From what I gather in that thread it is no longer being maintained, but I am a relatively proficient Python programmer in my spare time so I should be able to dig through it and figure out how to set the key-map to replicate what it is doing. From what I read in that thread it also appears that the keymapping is far more in-depth than what I have seen so far just by poking though the interface for changing keys. I suspect it will be worth my time to dig through the docs on how to deeply customize the keymapping if I intend to use Blender a lot going forward.
Ultimately my goal is to learn Blender in as “stock” a configuration as I can so that I can follow along with tutorials and (maybe someday) even help other users out with tutorials of my own. But I think that desire has to be balanced with a need to have Blender seamlessly fit in with some basic muscle memory. Navigation and basic selection (vs. more detailed selection) seem like two areas where I am willing to break from the Blender model in order to speed up and ease my transition. But I am going to try to keep those as limited as I possibly can.
You’re tying one hand behind your back with left click select/deselect all in empty space. Left click to place the gizmo has way more uses to me in Blender than being able to select like other programs just because that’s the way they do it. It’s also a nice way to not accidentally change your selection when you happen to click in the 3D view instead of the UI element you meant to click. The right-click drag translate is just evil though and I turn that off as one of the very few changes I make to the default hotkeys.
You can have multiple operators coexist on LMB if setup properly. As an example, both rSelect by Plyczkowski and my custom setup have Click Select; Box Select; and DeSelect On Empty all coexisting on the LMB.
Add to that seting up the modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Shift) and you can have consistent Add to Selection, and Subtract Selection all on that LMB, working with both Click Select and Box Select.
You should actually try one of those 2 setups before you go dismissing the paradigm.
Won’t having box select on mouse drag break vertex tweaking using the mouse? (eg. starting vertex dragging by clicking and dragging a vertex)
I prefer the key - drag way of using other selection tools and keeping more important operators on the mouse keys (in my case tablet buttons). I could try other methods but I doubt I would like it. That said newer people could like it.
or 3d cursor snapping.