Not sure why you'd need this. But you can select an element first (for continuity), hide unselected, then use select by SG, select your smoothing group, and voila.
Not quite what I mean. I would like something where it's like select by element mode but instead of selecting the entire element it would only select one contiguous Material ID or smoothing group depending on the setting. So if you have multiple groups of faces with the same smoothing group or material IDs it will only…
I see. It could be quite useful. As a workaround, you can select by ID, hide unselected, select one face, then hit "grow" under edit poly. It will only grow the selected area on visible faces, not invisible ones. I still don't see how you would need this so often that you require a hotkey/macro for it. Have you looked into…
Does anyone know of a way to select all connected polys with the same material ID or smoothing group? Would be a pretty cool scripts I reckon. I'd attempt to script it myself but that's way beyond my limited scripting skills. Maybe one of the Maxscript wizards out there can have a go at it?
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2904948/MaxScript/Martinez_Macro_GrowByMaterialID.mcr Here is my attempt to grow/expand by material ID. You can even select more than one face/matID to start.
And I'd be that artist. This works very well for my workflow. In combination w/ a hotkey for poly select by angle (5, 45, etc) it can get very fast to setup big areas for a Meshsmooth + by smoothing groups setup.
I'm doing a lot of mid poly stuff atm with loads of cut in panels that have different material IDS and I'm using support loops+ 1 smoothing group for the smoothing. Which results in a lot of geo and makes it a real pain to select stuff. I guess if you're doing conventional low/high poly work it's not that useful. That…