Is there a way to make the selected faces of a polysurface appear in a solid colour, just like Rhino does with SubD faces? In my Rhino 7 selected edges and faces of NURBS polysurfaces look identically, leading to inability to distinguish them from each other.
The solid yellow highlight of the selected face(s) could be temporarily hidden while dragging/rotating/scaling/extruding the face. Once the manipulation ends, the selected sub-object(s) get marked again in solid yellow.
Wish: Add SMART SELECT option in the Selection filter. Here is how it should work:
The aforementioned plus symbol could be implemented in Rhino (to both, NURBS and SubD) to let the user select either faces or the entire object in the simplest possible way. Clicking on the plus symbol selects the face, whereas clicking on the face outside the plus symbol selects the whole object. Easy win-win situation.
The plus symbol represents an invisible square area defined by the center of the selected face and oriented the same way as the '_CPlane _Object command would. Its size should be customizable and based on pixel value (such like 20 pixels or so).
I think what Bobi asked, a solid color (with maybe some bit of transparency) is best.
Polysurfaces/extrusions face selection would be cool if like SubD/Mesh face selection.
PS. During Curvature/Zebra/Draft/etc analysis, you can no longer see the solid color of selected SubD/Mesh
on the draft analyzed Subd, did I select 8 or 9 faces??? nobody knows.
Still seeing a bit of solid color would be best.
I really don’t think that this is a viable solution. In my opinion, the devs did the right decision to highlight the selected faces of SubD objects in a solid colour, this is why I asked if there is a way to make the faces of NURBS surfaces appear in the same way. Solid colour is the definitive, unbeatable solution compared to any other solution.
Selected faces in some programs are marked with an extra plus symbol in the center along with a highlighted border. Even that plus symbol is better than those overly-dense arrows. Imagine how those arrows would look like if there are 3x3 selected faces. I would rather have a single plus symbol than a gazillion of arrows trying to fill a small face. Example:
Also, inability to select points while “Sub-objects” is active in the Selection filter. Quite strange. Is that a bug?
The aforementioned plus symbol could be implemented in Rhino (to both, NURBS and SubD) to let the user select either faces or the entire object in the simplest possible way. Clicking on the plus symbol selects the face, whereas clicking on the face outside the plus symbol selects the whole object. Easy win-win situation.
Selected faces appear in a thicker yellow outline and yellow plus symbol:
Got to Rhino Options > Advanced > search for “highlight” and set the “MouseOver” options to True.
See Kyle screenshot.
@theoutside , that is surely a wonderful addition, but it shows only while selecting, before selecting.
and it’s sort of unrelated to original request…
It only shows a temporary outline and arrows just before picking the object or sub-object. However, that is not related to sub-object selection and can’t help with distinguishing already selected sub-object faces.
Also, no matter that I changed all 3 colours to black, the outline insists to be some random colour:
Exactly my thoughts. Lets hope that it will be implemented in Rhino 7 soon. However, I think that it must be a general setting for all viewport modes to keep parity with SubD.
Great discussion folks. I agree that the inconsistency between SubD/Mesh faces and nurbs surfaces needs to be addressed.
I also think teh yellow fill is very useful sometimes, but also very distracting some other times. I’d love to be able to have fully visible selection (yellow fill for all geometry types), but also be able to hide the selection color overlay mid-transformation, so I can see the model without any visual distractions as I’m live-editing it. This is a very common workflow in Photoshop and Illustrator, where you an hide your selection hits by pressing Ctrl+H.
The solid yellow highlight of the selected face(s) could be temporarily hidden while dragging/rotating/scaling/extruding the face. Once the manipulation ends, the selected sub-object(s) get marked again in solid yellow.
If the solid color supports also alpha channel, I would use it.
For example, editing a SubD while some analysis tool is active is pretty common for me. I’d like to see both simultaneously, how the draft/curvature is changing AND what is the currently selected faces.
Transparency solves that.
…as long as I can set the selection color to 100% transparent, yes. Because if I’m live-editing a model and looking at a curvature graph, zebra, or reflection map, I only want to look at the resulting geometry, not overlays of what’s being selected vs. unselected, while I’m making this edit.
Being able to choose between 0% and 100% opacity (just like the slider in the Materials editor) solves all problems. 0% will result in highlighted border only, whereas 100% will be a solid colour for the selected face. 50% is a semitransparent selected face.
I just watched a few videos on YouTube about the “PushPull” tool, and they reminded me how much better it would be to use “Smart select” which I proposed some time ago in this thread. It’s a real pain for those who work with a 3d mouse to be forced to constantly reach the keyboard to use Ctrl+Shift for sub-object selection. “Smart select” increases the productivity, saves time and reduces the usage of the keyboard, not to mention the benefit to using a 3d mouse hassle-free.
Note the plus handle located on the faces that literally replaces the need to preliminary hold Ctrl+Shift for each operation that requires to select a sub-object face.
Here is a side-to-side comparison between the current inconvenient sub-object selection and the proposed “Smart select”. I recommend the developers at “McNeel” to test this while using a 3d mouse to fully appreciate the advantage of using the plus handle.
I agree, I do that too often.
I also am stubborn enough to not simply switch global sub-object filter which would maybe save me some time. I guess I’m simply too much used to CTRL-SHIFT instead of reaching the docked filter…
Maybe you are in a similar situation?
Where would you put that in this scenario? (cherry picked)
The plus handle would be located at the same place for 3 surfaces, and it would look the same as the isocurves… a different solution is needed.
Also, another problem is that doing CTRL-SHIFT mean sub-selection AND “adding to selection”… it’s 2 different things at the same time.
Adding a new type of handle to sub-select an object would still require two modifier to specify when the user add/remove the new item from selection… or not?
The plus handle becomes cylindrical plus handle when it’s located on a cylinder. It simply has the same shape as the isocurve of the cylinder in your image.
Another option is to treat the isocurves as “pick sub-object surface”, while clicking outside the isocurve selects the main object. This is the easiest way to implement such a smart selecting.
As for the adding to selection or removing from selection, I already explained how it could be done at the very bottom of my last image above. No need to hold Ctrl+Shift to do that.
