Improved Selection of overlapping or occluded Bones

This is a seemingly small regression that happened during the transition between Blender 2.79 and 2.8.

Until Blender 2.79, switching the display mode to Wireframe made Bones fully transparent. And that was not purely a visual thing. It also meant that you could select overlapping bones with a single click by just clicking on the wireframe of a bone.

In Blender 2.8 and later Bones are never fully transparent which also means that you cannot directly select a bone occluded by another bone.

This illustration sums it up. The more overlapping bones there are, the harder it is to select the "deepest" bone).

The alt+click solution

Yes, you can alt+click which makes it possible to select from a list of all bones under the cursor. While this counts as a solution:

• some people don't know about it
• it is much less elegant than a single click

This may seem like a small paper cut, but I would argue that it is a big deal for riggers working with bones all day.

Meshes

Generally, we can select occluded meshes in wireframe mode. An exception is meshes in Edit mode + Face mode. For that Blender displays a dot at the center of each Face so that precise selection is possible.

Why isn't there a similar solution for Bones?

The proposal

The proposal is to bring back the functionality we had in Blender 2.79. We should be able to point to the wireframe of a bone, click on it, and select exactly the bone we were pointing at.

Alternatively, bones could feature a dot like faces do. However, that is less ideal because fully overlapping bone can be displayed with different thicknesses in b-bone display. Wireframe selection will allow us to select any bone in b-bone mode. Dot selection won't.

I also made a YouTube video about the issue: