Q: why are all components selected when i switch into Edit mode?

Why are all components selected when i switch into Edit mode?
other 3d applications have nothing selected at first and then you create the selections by yourself.
in blender every mesh component ( vertices etc ) is selected when you enter the edit mode for the first time for an object.

What is the reason / philosophy behind this?

This shouldn’t be a problem because when you select something with the select button (right mouse button by default), it deselects everything other than what you clicked unless you are holding shift.

On the other hand, if nothing were selected and the first thing you wanted to do was an operation on all the vertices, having everything selected by default will prevent you from having to press A.

I couldn’t never find an answer for that… that’s why if you have a super dense mesh and try to enter in edit mode for the first time it take ages…

Also I don’t know why blender doesn’t remember the selection you had when switching component modes…

Crazy stuff… :wink:

This should not be the case. The only time the verts are all automatically selected is when you add a new primitive. Blender remembers which verts are selected in an object when you append it into a scene, so if the file you are appending has all its verts selected this could happen.

This also might happen if you add a new cube, place a multires modifier on it, sculpt, and then hit apply. It will select the new verts that were made from verts that were selected in the original mesh. The same doesn’t happen with the new geometry created with dynotopo, so at worse you’ll have a few pre-selected verts here and there when you sculpt with that.

It does remember. It just throws out selections that can’t be made in the mode you are switching to.

For example, Select a few different edge loops that don’t share a face in edge select mode. When you switch to face select mode, it will deselect those edges. Now try this with the same two edges, but switch between edge and vert select mode. It will remember what you have selected when you switch because unlike with face select mode, you can select those edges in both modes. When you select a face loop in face select mode, you can move among all three modes without anything being deselected because you are able to select that face loop in all of them.

Unfortunately it happens all the time.

That’s what I’m talking about, it doesn’t remember… The selections shouldn’t change/be throwing away for nothing…

The thing is, those are really weird behaviors, and doesn’t exist in any other 3d app.

If you add any geometry to a mesh, that geometry has its selection state set to true. It makes sense, if you add something, you probably want to do something to it right away.

When you add (for instance) a Cube in object mode, that operator internally just calls the (edit mode) “Add Cube” routine, which in turn adds geometry that has its selection state set to true.

The geometry is already selected when you enter edit mode, you just can’t tell. It doesn’t get selected as you enter edit mode for the first time.

A lot of stuff happens when you enter edit mode, the denser the mesh, the longer it takes. I don’t notice a difference based on whether something is selected or not. There may be some extra work going on when entering for the first time, but selection isn’t part of it.

Sorry man, but this behavior doesn’t make sense…

Just load a blend file (or obj etc) with some mesh in it, then go into edit mode, and boom, all verts selected… :wink:

This area needs some work.

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It absolutely makes sense to select newly added geometry in edit mode. Imagine you had to select all that geometry manually after adding it, that would be tedious.

The fact that this behavior also happens to lead to new objects having all geometry selected is more of a coincidence. “Fixing” this behaviour (which I don’t think is a problem at all) would mean adding more complexity to the program.

Only if you saved the .blend file with the vertices selected. If they aren’t selected, or if only parts of the mesh are selected, that will be saved too.

If you import geometry, yes, the default is “selected”. Just hit “a” if you don’t like it.

Adding geometry in edit mode is not the issue, this is ok as it is…
The issue is the “magical” selection that happens when going from object to edit mode, that shouldn’t happen, no matter what…

It doesn’t happen. That geometry has always been selected. It was born selected.

To fix this “issue”, in many places in the code, there would need to be a parameter whether the geometry should be created “selected” or not. That’s a lot of if-else branching, plus it may break some code where the assumption is that geometry is always created “selected”.

You wanted to know why the geometry is selected, I gave you the reason. Keeping it that way is just common sense. There’s a difference between “this is a real problem in my workflow” and “I strongly believe it should work otherwise”. You literally can just hit the “a” button and be done with it.

Case dismissed.

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You missed the point… I know it might be hard to understand, so my advice is to take a look at how all other 3d apps handle this situaton… All will be clear…

Also, english is not my native language, sometimes is very hard for me to explain things… :wink:

It doesn’t really matter what other 3D Apps do, Blender just happens to work differently. Other apps may have real primitives for Cubes, Cones, Spheres etc. You first have to turn them to editable meshes to edit them at all. Some applications might not even save the selection state.

The question is, how is this a real problem? It’s not a performance issue, as you originally thought. It’s not working the way you remember it to work, there is no magic auto-selection at all. If it isn’t causing any real problems, if it’s just a pet peeve of some users, then there’s no point in changing the code to accommodate for it.

If that makes you happy, I agree in principle that not having newly added primitives be selected would make more sense. But that’s a more expensive feature than just re-using the code as-is.

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Why took you so long? I like when people say what’s meant to be said, instead of of complicate things trying to find good reasons for weird things. :+1:

Hmm, not sure about that… Displaying crazy selections in the viewport might be expensive…

It’s not about happiness… But I like to be hassle free… :wink:

But hey, I still got hope that someday BF will realize how wrong those things are and they will do the right thing… specially about the remembering of selections when switching component modes…

The question of the original poster was:

Why does it work this way?

There’s a good technical reason why it happens to work this way, I explained it.

I realize now that this is probably a waste of time, since people don’t really want to know why things don’t work the way they like. They just want them to work their way, but they don’t want to make it sound like a feature request.

Not sure what you mean here. Blender correctly remembers selection when switching between Edit Mode and Object Mode. It’s doing the right thing.

Only when you add new geometry is there a case where you need to deselect it. So just hit “a” and move on with your life…

I have high hopes that the Blender Foundation doesn’t ever waste time “fixing” every little annoyance that a handful of users have. There are much more important things to work on.

selections between points/edges/faces…

Ok, I get that, that’s an entirely different thing. You can’t (for example) have an edge selected when you’re in face select mode. So switching from edge to face may deselect the edges (unless they form a face).

What you can do however is hold shift when clicking the vert/edge/face buttons and be in both face and edge selection mode.

I don’t really have a strong opinion on this behavior either, but when in doubt, I wouldn’t change it.

And not just remembering…
The way things are displayed when selecting stuff should change too… As I showed here.

Things would be much clearer…

Its important to remember that in blender you can enable multiple selection modes at once by holding shift and clicking its icon. You don’t really have to switch between modes at all unless you want to.

Red, I tested this thoroughly before I made the last reply. Blender doesn’t auto select the components in a mesh object that you append to a scene. It looks like the object itself remember which verts were selected when it is saved. When you append in an object from another blend, only verts that were selected when it was saved will be selected when you switch that object to edit mode.

Here is an example blend to prove it:test.blend (458.7 KB)
Download this blend and append the plane in it into another scene. It should have the word test selected when you switch it to edit mode.

As I said before:

So maybe the confusion comes from that specific case where you use multires to sculpt on a cube. You can work around it by deselecting all the verts in the cube before you hit apply.

It doesn’t show you “as if it was face selection”, it literally does select the faces.

Look, you seem to have a lot of ideas on how things should be different, but this behavior has been ingrained in Blender users for the last decade. Any argument to change it would have to be really, really good.

To be fair, if you wanted everything to be selected when nothing is, you would just have to press A. That isn’t exactly tedious.