Vertex Selection in Blender??

melviso

i remember in Maya you could select a vertex and pressing the arrow key, the selection moves to the next vertex either by pressing up, left, right, or down. Is there a way you can cycle through selecting vertices like this in Blender?

Yadoob

Ctrl+Sift+"+" is the shortcut to extend the current selection

melviso

Thanks for the reply, yadoob. but I meant say I select a vertex, if I press left on the keyboard, the selection moves to the vertex on the left and deselects the previous vertex, if I press left again, it moves to the next one, while deselecting, same with up, down or right. It's like circling through a string of vertex highlighting one vertex at a time.
Is this possible in Blender.

RN

There isn't anything like that that's built-in but it's certainly possible to do with a scripted add-on (it's like a plugin) that would add this new selection method.

melviso

I did find two scripts for this but they are quite old and don't work with the newer Blender versions.

RN

Can you point me to the scripts?

melviso

RN said:

Can you point me to the scripts?

https://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11919
Can't find the other one atm, Don't know if it has been deleted or something

RN

That script seems to just select the next element of the mesh by advancing the element index, it doesn't take direction into consideration.

A way to do what you want is to take the selected vertex and all the other vertices that are connected to it and project them all to the screen.
With this you have a bunch of 2D points, so it becomes a 2D problem: calculating which one of those points, going from the centre point, goes in the direction that best follows the key that was pressed (left, right, up or down).
The scripting API has all that's needed to do this.

MmAaXx

I don't think this is a good idea to try to replicate exactly the maya workflow. 
after selected the first vertex, pressing ctrl+another vertex lets select the vertices in the shortest path. no need to increse the selection 1 by 1.

melviso

Thanks guys, yep, I will just have to do without the feature and manage the options available. I just thought of it when trying to pull vertices of a cage over highpoly mesh, quickly selecting vertices linked by edges seems intuitive. This was a Maya feature.

pior

Heya @melviso , in these cases you are probably better off asking directly about the end problem you are trying to solve (here : cage editing) in order to cut straight to the chase, simply because there might be even better/unexpected solutions other than the habits you developed coming from Maya.

For instance quickly selecting verts linked by edges might be faster using ctrl click (which selects all the components on a path between the last two selected components), and the sculpt tools might also be appropriate for your cage editing needs. And so on.

The XY problem : 
http://xyproblem.info/

dive

I actually found this pretty useful in Maya as well, when trying to quickly edit on a per vertex level and you can't do it all at once. Yet to find a script for this in blender..bit out of my depth to do it in python.