Seems like a very basic selection mode slipped under the radar all these years…
You know how we can add objects to current selection by holding SHIFT, and substract by holding CTRL? How about the third “intersect”? mode - window selection of objects just in already selected set? Can we add ALT-key modifier to do that? (@mikko)
(or is it currently possible and I missed it? I know you can do it with scripting now but that adds some extra clicks along the way and not nearly as intuitive as just the selection+modifier key to get this result). Quite often we have a need to select a subset of current selection and that would eliminate the need to lock or hide unselected objects and save some other steps.
Please see the sample below, the last selection [at 0:20s] shows better what I mean:
This way of selecting stuff inside an already selected subset, I wouldn’t call basic. Wouldn’t lasso selection or brush selection allow you to do what you are after?
a) it’s one of 3 standard boolean operations (in selection): we have add and substract, missing intersect
b) maybe in other software this would not be considered basic, but Rhino has so many advanced and sophisticated selection methods, that this one missing seems like an omission, and not a hard part to add.
In fact, you can get very similar behavior just by running this code when some objects are selected and you are ready for the subset:
arrO = Rhino.GetObjects("Original Selection?",,, True, True)
If Not isnull(arrO) Then Call Rhino.GetObjects("Subset Selection?",, False, False, True, arrO)
No, definitely not… The example video I posted was just to explain. This gets handy in more complex cases, for example imagine you select all objects on some layers but you really want these from certain area of a complex model. Without it now, we need to do several more steps to achieve this.
I can obviously use the above code to do this, but the downsides are: 1) initial selection gets “unhighlighted” while picking the subset 2) need to run the script command or alias to actually make it work.
So what I think would be really handy is a key modifier in relevant selection commands (like ALT when window-select) to achieve selection subset. I bet you don’t even think about pressing CTRL or SHIFT when adding/substracting to selection in Rhino, which is how it’s supposed to be. I am after the same thing with selection subset (selection boolean intersection). I have been wrong many times about this but I will risk saying it again: should not be that hard to implement
