Try it if you dare ! Maya selection issue

pior

It's rant time! :P
Try this in Maya, any version will do:



I know that selection behaviour in Maya is acclaimed by many users but I don't get it... It all feels nice and responsive but! Some faces can't be selected even if your cursor is right over them :O Maya tries to be smart and selects the faces slanted towards the camera, instead.

Anyone else experiences this problem? It occurs when polygons are arrangend just like the underside of a roof, like in the pic. Obviously if you zoom in alot it becomes selectable but still, it shouldn't work that way. One workaround I found is to have various selection preferences turned on so that Maya selects the wrong adjacent face but also 'bleeds' the selection and selects the one I want to get - I can then unselect the undesired ones. It is less frustrating than not being able to select the desired face at all, but still is a pain :P

My tickbox size is set to 10 pix but this shouldn't make faces that my cursor is right on top of, unselectable...

Rhaaa!

Thanks for your help.

dur23

Maya sucks at selecting anything. I would say it's a selection terrorist.

Michael Knubben

JIHAD!

I don't have Maya installed here, otherwise I'd try it. Because I dare.

HEx

looks to me there isn't a face there to begin with.

the face you are trying to select seems not to be there it has the same color as the backround, wich makes me to belive it's nothing there, kinda hard to select a face thats not there, if it somehow is a face there, it might have got reversed normals somehow.

and when i run maya, i have center dot face selection. (face get a selection point in the middle of it) gets easyer to select.

I myself have never encountered this in my 6 years using maya.

MoP

I think if Pior says there's a face there, there's a face there

Especially since it doesn't have the same colour as the background...

Mark Dygert

You're right! I tried clicking on the face and couldn't select it... maya is borked.

HEx

hehe if you say so ^^
I got a crappy screen, so it might be that too

robioto

NEX plug in for Maya implements a hybrid raycast/marquis with selection highlighting that might help in situations like that.

www.draster.com

Marine

try switching to wireframe, whenever the little blue dots disappear, switching over always makes them visible.

pliang

Also go into windows...polygon display and change the setting from face center to face so that instead of selecting the annoying dots...you can now just select the face as well by clicking on the face.

IxenonI

Try selection the upper or lower edge, hold ctrl and press the right mouse button. Now select to faces. You now have the 2 faces that share this edge selected. Deselect the unwanted face by holding ctrl while selecting.

bugo

i never had this problem because i use backface culling to select my objects, maybe this can help you.

pior

Hehe yeah Hex there is a face there :P The reason why it is white is because this is the way Maya's high quality rendering handles double faces - it somehow adds their values which i find very handy when checking and cleaning up meshes.

And btw the selection bahaving oddily was not a consequence of the double face thing. It's just that the screenshot I took happened to be taken while cleaning up a mesh. This weird selection behaviour happens in every 'slanted roof' situation for me. I kinda envy you! It happens to me pretty much every day in 1.5 years of use :P

Yup Robioto Nex is better at this. Thing is I cannot use a Nex-only workflow for my daily use... Nex introduces great tools but it still lacks some of the things I get out of classic Maya tools and custom Mels/Pythons I use every second :P Plus the time I spent switching in and out of Nex does not make it worth it (for polygonal speed ling I mean). I think I could switch to a Nex-only workflow with a bit of will BUT the latest Nex x64 beta for Maya 2008 that I have to use is quite a bugfest and is not production-ready in my opinion. Still I love Quadraw obviously!

Marine I don't have much experience with the center dot mode, I usually turn it off as soon as I see it... I guess I could five it a try, saw it used by workmates occasionally. Does it mean you HAVE to hit the center of the face to select it? Or can you also select the face at different spots? (don't have Maya right at the moment, cannot try right now)

Pliang yeah that's what I have, no center selection dot, just plane face - but it doesn't work ...

Ixenon! I had a workaround sort of like yours in the past. I used to have Maya configured so that when in face mode, if I hit close to an edge Maya would select the two adjacent faces in the ambiguous 'roof' situation. Kindof like your fix, just a bit faster. But this is still no acceptable solution...

Bugo I'll try that. What kind of backculling option do you use? The display options, of the object specific attribute?

I switch between backfaceon / backfaceoff all the time when ling, maybe I can try to see if this fixes it.

Please keep the reports coming! I'm quite curious about that one. I mean if my mouse is over a face, it has to get selected no matter what! Funny crap. Maya has a certain sense of humour I guess :P

rooster

pior- I'm curious what workflow you have that is incompatible with nex? are there scripts that don't work with nex enabled?

edit: I had a go at this, I wasnt able to reproduce the problem until I zoomed right out and the polygon was pretty small onscreen, then it selected the polys either side instead. I had a look and my click box size was at 4, so I changed it to 1 and I could select the poly. Is there any particular reason you prefer it at 10?

edit again: doh of course, vert selection. It didn't occur to me since nex has the nearest-to-mouse thing. It does seem like a pick box size issue though- maybe you could come up with a toggle button that changes the setting for when you're having this problem if you're handy with the scripts?

Marine

yep, means you have to click the dot each time you want to select that face. it's not a problem for me, but it might be annoying for others.

MoP

Yeah, make a script that toggles your pick box size to different values, and just bind it to the keys/shortcuts you'd usually use for switching between vert/edge/face/uv modes.

pior

Alright I'll try all your suggestions today an will come back soon with what I gather from them. Roost, yes I think a rather wide box size is a needed for me esp since I m.o.d.e.l (still can't type that word for some reason, crazy!) everything with the stylus for faster tweaking. Plus screen resulution is now much higher than what it was in the Maya1 days and I am quite sure that the default click box size setting has not changed since then :P

Still, a rather large tickbox size should *not* create such issues ... The app should still reach for the polygon right under the mouse! Do you guys have experience with Maya bug reporting? I really need to contact them about that, I find it quite awesome that such a widely used program reached release #9 with such an issue.

Interesting idea about the script thing. Don't know if this will fix the issue, I'll ask a tech guy to get that done soon. (I have no idea on how do code that kind of thing haha!)

funshark

eheh pior, you still have workflow issues

it's very right that the face selection in maya is not as good as it should be.
The "face center" default selection, contrariwise, works very well, but you lost some speed

pior

Hehe yup sharky I think I am too much of a perfectionist when it comes to these things. I mean I can work with that, but I have difficulties with the idea of an application making things harder than they *could* be...

Still it seems like Maya is the app most likely to be bent to ones specific needs via scripts and such. (it's quite nice that the tickbox size is indeed exposed to the user).It's too bad it requires so much messing around tho.

pior

Ha-haaaa! Look what I managed to select. Yes, that one tiny little corner of a polygon. Even with Maya defaults options no one could select that :P



So yeah I followed you guys suggestions and duplicated all the F8 F9 F10 F11 F12 (and the ctrl-FX shortcut I have that convert from one mask to the other) commands to the 'user' shortcut category and added selectpref -cbs x at the end of each. I set Object and Edge to 4pix, Verts to 10, and Faces to 1pix. Might want to use 2pix for the edges, time will tell.

Such a heavy workaround ... I guess that will do for now. If you have other ideas please tell!

Thanks so far!

funshark

with default options? If you mean "face center" i'm sure you can with x-ray combo

Panupat

Maya 2008 has a lot of selecting problem for me. Once, all I had was 3 cubes. I clicked on the front most cube but could never got it selected, Maya 2008 selected the farthest cube behind it all the time.