Can Blender Have a Vertex Soft Selection Option Update?
My background is with Autocad and 3ds max, which has a great vertex soft selection option that Blender could benefit from. Many of the modelling tools in Blender only take you so far and/or have not been added to or changed for many years. This is one option that I frequently use in 3ds max when modeling such things as say an aircraft fuselage. Soft selection would, for example, allow you to select a single vertex and by dragging a slider allow that selection to gradually expand increasing its area off influence. Soft selected vertices would then act (almost) individually depending on the area of influence and distance from the main vertex you picked. Dragging the selected vertex bring along the soft selection to create a new form quickly and efficiently.
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I know it's not the same, but I made this video (in response to your post, because I found it an interesting question!) - youtu.be/aQgJlKhblqU
Isn't that what proportional editing does? Or do I misunderstand (it's been over a decade since I used Max)
It is very similar, but max lets you adjust from a selected vertex by changing the colour off the vertices. You can therefore see the falloff before you make any modifications, which is very helpful when modeling. Vertices close to the selection point could be coloured say red and the falloff range might show as a change in colours from yellow to green to blue following the shape of the curve you selected. I don't see more experienced Blender 'gurus' using proportional editing where I would have in max and guess that's because it's not as friendly or accurate as it could be. I'm sure there are lender users that find the existing tool more than accurate and guess it's not for everybody.
I see, I had to watch a 3Ds Max tutorial to understand what it does, I guess I never got that far in Max. Nice visualisation with the weight map. I guess the main thing missing is the custom falloff profile. You could do that with a modifier, but of course that's not as convenient. I'll dig into this a bit more for a possible video topic (if I can find a nice workflow). Interesting!