Preselection highlighting for mesh components in edit mode
Preselection highlighting for mesh components in edit mode would be very useful.
Many other software have this feature. I know this has been discussed earlier in other forums, but not here.
Simply put, this is how it works:
- Hover over vertex - vertex gets highlighted
- Hover over edge - edge gets highlighted
- Hover over face - face gets highlighted
This should only work in edit mode.
The other discussion I mentioned: devtalk.blender.org/t/preselection-highlighting/4267/41 wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/AntiFeatures
Why?
This could be combined with keyboard shortcuts that could operate on hovered/highlighted feature;
- Hover over an edge - press the keyboard shortcut to bevel it
- Hover over a face - press the keyboard shortcut to inset it
And so on. Editing meshes requires way too much of clicking and dragging of components *in any software, so why not make it easier for those who already know the drill.
4 Comments
This should be added as a mode that can be simply toggled on/off. Despite being a staple of other similar software, discussion of this action just 2-3 years ago was that performance wasn't consistent; but with Blender's advances under the hood in interpreting meshes and updating the depsgraph and GPU improvement its time this became a feature in Blender.
Personally, outside of soft selection / proportional editing, I find preselection highlighting overly distracting too quickly to be worth it.
But the idea of being able to perform actions on pre-selected content sounds fun 🤔
I was just looking at this feature in Houdini and I find it ideal at object level and at edit level and if for users who do not want it, they have the possibility to disable it.
It seems to me that it has many benefits not only visual, the main justification for switching from RMB for selection to LMB was to take care of carpal tunnel syndrome, this could help a lot to avoid the constant clicking.
I remember somebody made a branch after 2.8 with preselection highlight and it was quite nice. If it was a performance drop I did not feel it. Now that attributes are better managed this should be easier and with even better performance.