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
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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.
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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!