I use Modo, but maybe Maya has something similar. It has a useful edge selection tool called diagonal which selects the diagonals you need to remove to go back to a quads mesh. It's not perfect but it does a good 80% of the job, the selection needs to be adjusted by hand.
Looks like you've turned on soft selection. Double click the select (or translate/rotate/scale) tool on the left toolbar and in the tool settings palette uncheck soft selection. I'm not a regular Maya user so I don't know what the hotkey is, or if there even is one by default.
I do some interface work too, using layer effects sometimes. I made an Action for that does the Vig thing, works really well. New Layer Merge Duplicate Set selection Set channel Alpha1 to selection Delete layer Set selection to none
Without scripts: Extrude the border, select the newly extruded faces (ctrl-clicking the face level to convert selection from edge to face), switch back to edges and delete the selected loop for cleanup. Free script alternatives: Extend Surface (UI-less) Extend Borders (with UI)
Usually I would just use the pen tool to trace the shape, but the quick way on that image would be to magic wand select the background with a bit of tolerance, and delete the background. Then ctrl click the layer to get the selection you want, and fill the selection with a plain color in another layer.
So Im ready to export a scene into UDK. Built it out in Maya, but Im having trouble triangulating everything. I select all objects in my scene, select Triangulate and only one or two objects get triangulated. Instead of going and selecting each object individually (which would take forever), is there a quick way to change…
colour ID range or fuzzy selection .... so when you select an ID colour it automatically expands the 1 bit selection to cover a slightly broader range of colour, so mitigating any anti aliasing or fuzzy edges that seem to be difficult to avoid using a zbrush/xNormal pipeline.
Not sure why you need a physically based render of a wireframe, hah. If you do the above wireframe method then select 'Render' in the top-left of the Blender UI and select 'OpenGL Render'. You'll get a full shaded render for presentation, use a matcap 'N' and select something. Repeat.
Modo selections style in 3ds max. Assign a hotkey(or button), select 2 verts/edges/faces woth desired gap between them and start pressing your hotkey. :) http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/step-gap-vertedgepoly-ring-like-modo-selection Why I can't embed the video ?! :)
In the Hypershade, you can right click on a material and get a selection of everything it's assigned to. This button grabs all materials on an object (but not face selection). You may want to check out Material Manager, super super handy script by Bartalon, it auto highlights materials in the list based on selection.