I’ve got a complex mesh with a lot of overlapping forms that I’m trying to set up weight maps on. Weight paint doesn’t work too well, because of the complexity, so I’m doing vertex seection to set up vertex groups first. I was wondering if there was a key or tool that would let me inverse visibility on the vertexes without affecting selection?
If that’s not too clear, to explain: there was such a thing in Lightwave where you could refine vert selection by first selecting an area, making it hidden, and checking out the selection edge. If the edge was raggedy, you could select a few more, hide again, or inverse which polys were shown/hidden to fill in. In effect, you could use show/hide as a sort of temporary bag to hold the polys you would then select and assign to a vertex group…
It was really useful,ad if Blender doesn’t already have it, I’m definitely going to request it…
On that note, it’s a good idea to press SPACE and have a quick look through the menu, not only will you find those options, but they will have the shortcut keys written next to them :eyebrowlift:
And, on the edit tools tool bar [F9] under the Mesh Tools 1 tab there are 3 buttons: Select Swap, Hide, and Reveal. Select Swap will do what you are asking.
Does anyone know if that button has a keyboard shortcut???
Try this. Select the vert you’re working on, Click shift-h, do your thing, deselect all, alt-h, select swap (or various combinations). If you just use the buttons it’s even faster. I haven’t been able to find a shortcut for select swap.
Hi, Guys–
Thanks for all the suggestions. I am actually familiar with all of them except the Mesh Tools I options. Thanks for that one! Unfortunately, none of those tools does what I’m talking about, so I guess I wasn’t too clear. If it was labeled according to Blender terms, I guess what I’m looking for would be called “Hide Swap”. I’ll try to describe it again.
Say you make a sphere with the default 32 subdivisions. Select the top five rows, make them hidden. Now, what I’d like to do is inverse the Hide command and hide the bottom verts while revealing the selected upper ones. Now deselect the upper verts. Inverse again (nothing is selected now), select the top row of the bottom group, click Hide, and that selected row is now part of the first selected group of five rows (now six). See? The Hide function becomes a sort of pocket where you can temporarily store groups of verts, whether selected or not, and clear out the selection area, as well. When you want to assign them to a vertgroup or whatever, you just reveal the set you want, B-select and go.
Couldn’t you do what you want by using the H key to add additional verts to the hidden part ? then alt-H to reveal then W-9 to invert the selection ? Or am I still not understanding what you are talking about ?
Oh by the way there is a “Face Mode” in Weight Painting . You can access it with the hotkey “F” . As someone who also finds weight painting more then a little tedious finding out about this a couple of days ago made my day . All the mesh hide/reveal keys work and you can only apply weight values only to the selected faces ! Actually just go here for more information .