I spend a lot of time in Studio selecting parts. It’s pretty common to upgroup a model, do a small edit, then want to group it up again. So you’re selecting parts constantly and in busy scenes it can be pretty annoying.
It would be awesome if Studio had smarter selection tools a la Photoshop. The one, in particular, that I miss the most is the “Magic Wand” selection tool that will select all contiguous pixels in an image that are similar to the selected pixel.
It would be really sweet if I could select the orange staircase here, which is not a model just a bunch of parts, by clicking any orange corroded metal brick and Studio would be smart enough to select all the other orange corroded metal bricks that are touching it, recursively until the entire thing is selected.
Have you tried holding Alt while selecting Parts that are in Models?
You can also select one of the Select, Move, Scale, Rotate tools and hold Alt then click and drag your mouse across the screen. Granted it doesn’t select all the Parts like you were referring to, but if you moved the camera below the staircase and aimed it toward the sky you’d be able to select a lot of the Parts just in the staircase, then while still holding ALT hold CTRL and individually click on the rest.
Trying to avoid picking individual parts one at a time. I think the UX can be better than that most of the time.
Most of the time my scenes are busier than this, so it’s really crappy to use a selection box to create a frustrum in 3d space to select all the parts inside of indiscriminately.
A magic “select all linked/joined” parts tool would be cool too now that I think about it.
A magic wand tool sounds very pluginable. Might be a fun weekend project to try.
There’s a lot of improvements I want to make to the selection tools, but little tools like this are super annoying to find in the unorganized disaster that is the plugin bar, and are super far from other more convenient and intuitive places in the ribbon.
It would be great if user plugin organization could be fixed soon, or else selection could be given an overhaul including nice features like this so I don’t have to write all this functionality into plugins that currently cannot be as convenient to access as core tools.
For a tool like this, would material, color, reflectance, and transparency be the only properties you’d really care about? What about children such as textures or surfaceappearance? Would parts have to be touching or should proximity be the deciding factor instead?
I would make it like the magic wand in photoshop, which has reasonable defaults but also has a bunch of sliders that let you control things like this.
I think a good default could be “select all the parts with the same color+material that are touching/intersecting”.
Roblox actually has more ontological information to work with than photoshop does, since in theory it understands how parts are semantically grouped into models and it understand how those parts are physically linked into assemblies.
Selecting something like a car based on physical constraints should be not too hard. It’s the entire assembly and it is not welded to the floor.
I don’t think they should be plugins, this is core dragger tech and should appear on the Model View in Studio, IMHO. It can still be lua/a plugin but as an end user I don’t care about those implementation details. It’s fine if Roblox makes an API so users can write their own selection plugins, but I also think the default selector should take a stab at it.
Do we know what % of dev time is spent selecting things in the Workspace? When I’m building it’s a significant percentage for me.
Definitely agree this is more of a core dragger thing, just mentioning that a big reason why Roblox should think about doing this is that even if it’s possible to make a plugin for this, and if someone does make a plugin, the UX for using that plugin will be awful and very inferior to what we would get if Roblox went above and beyond to offer this functionality natively.
A huge amount of the time I spend building is wasted on selection. I do a very large amount of world building, and it’s very difficult to completely select major landforms so I can expand an area for example.
E.g. last year I needed to select every single part in this wall so I could make this underwater pit larger. All of the parts involved have the same appearance so this definitely could have been automated. I also misclicked and cleared my whole selection twice while doing this. Being able to magic wand this, or brush-select by similarity to a target would have been a big help.
A bit different, but something else I want to do is move these islands so I can expand this cliffside. All of the parts I need to move are isolated physically from other parts. It would be cool if I could do something like a floodfill to select everything “connected” to a target part up to a certain range.
While it’s a pretty good idea that you and @PeZsmistic mention and I’d certainly use some of the functions this tool would perform, I guess when I make a place I start by building almost everything into models. I almost never have anything directly in Workspace. I would build by putting things like each staircase into a Model or Folder, and then have the whole section of staircases in another Folder. In Pezsmistic’s wall example I’d have all the wall sections involved in a sub Model or Folder like LeftWall or NorthWall, and have other walls in other subgroups in a group making up a Walls Model.
I absolutely can’t stand scrolling for long times to get through the Explorer window when I can take 500 items, put them in a Model, then minimize that Model in the window to be able to scroll past 1 item instead.
Actually no.
As stated, if I’m searching through a place with 50,000 or more Parts then there’s no way I’m not keeping it organized.
Models and Folders work very well for organizing your builds better.
