Selection Improvements

[kirazeee325 (Kira Sze)]

UPDATE:

Hey Developers!

We’re thrilled to announce the full release of selection improvements. Since the release of the beta in January, the team has been listening to your feedback and working hard to adjust and make improvements.

---

Original Post:

Here are some features to help you more easily and accurately interact with complex scenes and models!

Available today as a bundled, opt-in beta feature called Selection Improvements, these changes will be fully launched after we gather feedback from the community.

Selection and Hover Outline

When hovering and selecting objects, you can choose to see geometric outline as the feedback (instead of the previous default of bounding boxes); geometric outlines provide a more accurate view of the selected geometry and reducing visual clutter.

You can now choose how selected objects are rendered through a new button in the View tab: outlines, bounding boxes, or both.

Selection Cycling

You can now select visually obstructed objects in the viewport without moving your camera view by using selection cycling. This feature allows you to cycle through overlapping objects under your mouse cursor in the 3D view. Activate selection cycling by doing multiple alt-clicks on an object.

Select Parents

You can now select nested models from the viewport with the select parents function. Activate this function by ctrl-clicking one object or multiple selected objects. If you select two objects, then two direct Parents will be selected. If all objects happen to have the same direct Parent, then only that Parent will be selected.

Selection Outline Thickness

The width of selection outlines is now expressed in pixels instead of studs (which took up unnecessary world space in the viewport). Now, selection outlines are non-obtrusive, no matter how much you’ve zoomed into your scene.

Changes Since Beta Launch

Expand to learn more about changes, many related to requests from the community, that we’ve made since the initial beta release in early January.

Click to expand

• Improved depth feedback on selection and hover
  

  • If you select multiple overlapping objects, the selection outlines will show render around each individual object, and objects in the forefront will occlude overlapping outlines of objects behind them. This not only provides more depth feedback and allows you to differentiate between individual models/objects selected, but also ensures that you’ll always receive selection feedback on an object in your viewport.
  • If you select something that’s occluded by another object that isn’t selected, the overlapping selection outline will render semi-transparent.
  • If you hover over something that’s behind a selection outline, the hover outline is rendered semi-transparent, and vice-versa. This way, hover feedback will never fully occlude selection feedback, and vice-versa.
  • Team Create outlines also render overlapping outlines that are behind them semi-transparent, providing more depth information. Additionally, a collaborator’s outlines, if overlapping, will merge. However, if multiple collaborators select overlapping objects, the outlines won’t merge, to allow for differentiation between TC collaborator outline colors and fills.

• Selection cycling improvements
  Selection cycling no longer interferes if you’re trying to select the closest atomic object in a scene; alt+click will now cycle on mouse up, so you can select and also start dragging on the atomic object in the forefront.

• Bounding boxes rendered in relative world space
  Instead of rendered in studs, the width of bounding boxes is now expressed in “relative world space”, meaning that the thickness of bounding boxes will depend on the distance from your camera to the object with the bounding box. As a result, the bounding box will be non-obtrusive, no matter how much you’ve zoomed into their scene. And the bounding box will still be able to provide depth and perspective information, as it’s still rendered in world space.

• Feedback on mouse down and hover feedback on a selected object
  When bounding boxes are toggled on, you can now see bounding boxes on hover, which provide feedback on mouse down and hover feedback on a selected object

• Default setting changes
  To maximize readability of hover and selection outlines, we’ve changed the default thicknesses and turned off hover animation as default. These values can still be customized in Studio Settings.

  • Note on new defaults: If you’ve customized your bounding box thickness (for hover or selection) in the past, these values will remain, but will be translated to relative world space (this should appear very similar to pixels). Our new defaults are only applied to users who are new to studio (e.g. on fresh install) or who’ve never changed default bounding box thickness.
  • New default settings:
    • Hover animation: off
    • Selection line thickness: 2 (pixels)
    • Selection hover thickness: 4 (pixels)
    • Selection box thickness: 1 (relative world space)
    • Hover box thickness: 2 (relative world space)

---

Known Issues:

The team has identified a couple cases where outlines can appear stuck on the screen and a fix for these will be in the next release.

---

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns down below.

Thank you!

[TheRings0fSaturn (SaturianNightmare)]

Is there a reason why alt-clicking selects textures now when a part is inside of a model?
I feel like this does more harm than good, because you’d have to delete the texture or select the part manually from the explorer.

Other than that small problem, this is a fantastic update!

[2jammers (james)]

Thanks for utilizing the new highlight feature! The selections look so much better. Anyways, will you have something in the context menu to turn off AlwaysOnTop? I personally find it quite annoying to have this enabled by default.

@kirazeee325

is now expressed in pixels instead of studs

FINALLY, the selection boxes wont be annoying when making small detail!

[frriend (Neohertz)]

@kirazeee325

geometric

This is great. Exited to try it out.

[GreatGuyBoom (Boom)]

While this is definitely an interesting addition, in regards to the selection change, I have two inconveniences with it.

1. It is extremely hard to tell the difference between a grouped and ungrouped model. The only way I can tell if I’ve ungrouped a model, is in the explorer. Other than that, visually they look the same to me?

2. I can’t exactly recall what alt-clicking something did, as it’s entirely in my reflex memory to use it, but something about it just seems off? If you hold alt and click something, it’ll eventually click the object that is behind it? And it could continue if you had a series of objects in a row. I’ve come to realize this is selection cycling.

I think alt-clicking might’ve had to do something with selecting a texture inside of a parent, without selecting the parent? It also seems touchy on which texture I can select?

I’m holding alt on the entirety of this video

Other than that, thanks for your work, and thanks for adding the bounding box option!

---

EDIT

I’d also like to formally request that Ctrl/Cmd+B be the keybind behind selecting the parent. I’ve had a plugin for the past few years that does exactly that, and it’s the perfect keybind for the job.

[gato_todomenso (Kahel)]

This is a much needed feature! However, will we get the LineThickness property from Highlight for developers use?

[CriticalDucky]

I’ll stick to boxed selections for now, but this is a good change. I’m also concerned about how selecting objects that already have highlights works. Sometimes, there will be little to no contrast expressed when hovering over an item that already has a highlight.

Also, it’s impossible to distinguish selected items from deselected items when they are visually contained within a selected item. For example, a selected Baseplate overshadows these two carrots. One of them is selected, and one of them isn’t. Can you tell which one it is? There is a 50% chance your guess is incorrect

Also, selecting the bounding box toggle adds the box instead of replacing the outline. That’s a little strange:

Edit: Can you guys add a way for us to find the current hover selection in Selection since it’s no longer immediately clear due to the addition of selection cycling? This would help plugins customize the look of selections.

[Evercyan (Cyan)]

SELECTION. CYCLING. THANK. YOU.

This update will definitely improve my selection workflow tremendously, it makes selecting and viewing MeshParts, Unions and Models a whole lot easier as it isn’t just a box. The explorer changes today are very welcome as well.

I was not actually expecting to see selection cycling, which surprised me, and I’ve been waiting for something like this for years now and it’s awesome to finally see it. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to select something like an NPC’s Torso under their HumanoidRootPart, or meshes with huge bounding boxes over something else, which caused so much irritation.

Is there any chance we could see more customization options, like the ability to add inner highlight color and transparency? It could help me in certain circumstances where the outer edges may not be entirely on screen, like inside of multiple rooms.

[SuperSpaceMan230 (Spacy)]

Still kinda prefer the box selection we have, but it’s worthy in exchange for the rest of the features listed here, looks great

[ItsKoiske (Koiske)]

While this one is going to take a minute to get used to, it is awesome to see this change. Mouse-click functionalities felt especially dated with how advanced some stuff on studio is becoming and it’s great to see that this has not been forgotten about.

[kingerman88]

@kirazeee325

Bounding boxes can still be toggled on from a new setting in the View tab.

Thank you for this!

[ObviouslyPurple]

A mixture of opinions about this.

1. I am NOT a fan of highlighting the entire object part, I believe the selection box method rather than highlighting it was easier than how it is now, tho, by all means, I do believe that it will grow on me eventually. But it’s still a hard adjustment.

2. I DO LIKE that it’s way easier to work with tiny objects now, and that you can actually see the changes you’re making by zooming in and out. That part I’m totally a fan of.

3. I DO and DONT like the TeamCreate changes with this before it would only turn green if someone in a TeamCreate file selected an object, now it is random, I like that but the highlighted part of it is a heavy distraction, and just covers way too much unnecessary space on a screen, I wish the opacity or thickness of it was lower when on a TeamCreate file another user selects an object.

But that’s about it.
I do believe that it’s a GREAT change, but with a few needed tweaks and changes. Heavily more so on the TeamCreate part, love for that to be less bright and more transparent.

[MasterDaniel]

The previous bounding box is pretty important for knowing when a model has rotation, so whilst I will be toggling bounding boxes back on initially it would be nice to somehow replicate that use case with the new highlights. But just make sure there are no plans to ever remove the option to use the old bounding boxes

[DieSoft]

(The original post was about bounding boxes not being visible anymore, but after reading one of the replies above, I discovered that enabling through the “View” tab is possible and thus deleted the original message.)

New post:
Please enable “Bounding Boxes” by default. I feel like it should be opt-out rather than opt-in for easier readability.

[ImTheBuildGuy]

I agree, the AlwaysOnTop is a bit annoying, but the rest looks great!

[GreatGuyBoom (Boom)]

Honestly, after actually using the selection cycling part of the update. Please let us disable this feature, It’s so counterproductive for myself and it is making selecting a specific part inside of a model beyond hard. I keep selecting the instance behind the model itself.

Thank you.

[iGottic]

Yayy, good update! Side question, does this mean we can use more than ~30 highlights at a time now?

@kirazeee325

Bounding boxes can still be toggled on from a new setting in the View tab.

Finalllyyy, a Roblox update that gives a setting instead of outright removal!

[Vyntrick]

@GreatGuyBoom

It’s so invaluable

I think you meant “not valuable” or something alongside the lines of that. invaluable means to be priceless.

Also I really agree with your reply. We should be able to toggle most settings on this new selection update so people can find what works best for them. Changes like these won’t exactly fit the use case of everyone.

I believe a reply from earlier mentioned that the use of Highlights makes it hard to distinguish what is what. You also can’t disable the AlwaysOnTop attribute of this highlight featured that’s packed into the selection system.

More options = the better!

[OKevinO]

Something I noticed with selection in general is the selection accuracy. This is evident when you’re working with more complex models that contain custom meshes with CollisionFidelity set to “Box”.

The reason I bring this up is because the new selection outline shows you exactly what mesh you’re attempting to select. But it also shows you that its really difficult to select certain meshes that are within the bounding box of another mesh.

It seems like selection accuracy is dependent on CollisionFidelity, it works great when on Default or PreciseConvexDecomposition but works terribly with Box. Is there any possibility to have selection accuracy ignore the Box collision setting? Selection cycling seems like the solution to this but It seems a bit odd showing a selection of a mesh that my mouse isn’t currently hovering over.