Add toggle to ignore backface-culled faces when selecting in edit mode
There is currently no option (or if there is, it is incredibly hard to find any reference to it) to make broad selections of faces behind backface-culled faces.
For better understanding, see the following example.
This is a subdivided default cube with its normals recalculated towards its inside, viewed in Viewport Shading with backface culling enabled. This is a commonly used starting point for making video game interior environments that aren't connected to the outside / an outside world. You can think of this cube as any type of closed interior environment:
To make broad selections of faces for editing or applying materials, one would either need to go inside the mesh and select if from there, select the faces via its UVs, hide the blocking culled faces temporarily, or select them carefully through wireframe view.
This proposal is to add a toggle to ignore faces that are currently culled from the viewport camera, making it easy to freely select only faces that are currently rendered. As a better visualization of what the proposal aims at specifically, here you can see how selection works by default, even with backfaces culled:
And here you can see what this proposal should enable users to do in practice, assuming that it is the cube as in Image 1 and Image 2 (it isn't, I deleted the culled faces for the purpose of demonstration):
This toggle could be displayed right under the backface-culling option, showing users that this option now exists and is contextually related to that option.
Please add this functionality, I was extremely baffled that there isn't already an option like this, and many people trying to help me figure out if there already was were baffled as well.
An example use case for this would be the creation of retro-style video game interior environments (that aren't connected to an overworld/outside world). Theses typically have only faces as wall (aka no thickness) and are backface-culled. Having this features would make it much much easier to select and edit their meshes from the outside, as doing it form the inside can be a pain to navigate around in.
5 Comments
This should be the default behavior. Considering Blender goes through (sometimes excessive) attempts to make it impossible to select invisible objects, the fact that they allow you to select invisible faces makes no sense.
You get my vote. Blender is really lacking in viewport settings. PBR / Eevee is nice, but sometimes more granular control and custom setups are needed.
This sounds truly valuable
This would be really useful.
💯 I was just about to request this feature! Big pain-point trying to do gamedev blockouts.