Selecting objects
Click, shift-click, and rubber-band selection, the Select menu (Select All, None, Invert, Hierarchy, Parent, Similar, by type) with its shortcuts, what "primary" selection means, and why a room-sized floor stops taking the click in its middle.
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Selection is how you tell the editor "this is the thing I mean." On desktop, a plain left-drag is reserved for selecting, which is exactly why orbiting needs the Alt key (see Moving around the viewport).
| To… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Select one object | Left-click it in the viewport, or click its row in the Scene Tree. |
| Add to the selection | Shift+click another object. Shift-clicking something already selected removes it. |
| Marquee-select | Left-drag a rectangle across empty viewport space: the drag direction decides what it grabs (see Window vs crossing below). Hold Shift while dragging to add the marquee to your current selection. |
| Deselect everything | Click an empty patch of the viewport. |
Big flat surfaces step aside
Working inside a room, the floor sits under nearly every gap between the props, so a plain click kept landing on it and the hover outline strobed on and off as the pointer crossed those gaps. So a room-sized flat surface stops taking the click in its middle. Aim at the chair and you get the chair.
The rule is narrow on purpose. A surface only steps aside when all three of these are true at once:
- It is plate-shaped, one dimension much thinner than the other two. That is what a floor, a wall, a ceiling and an imported flat slab have in common, and what a chair does not.
- It fills at least half the screen right now. The same floor seen from across the room is small on screen, easy to hit on purpose, and stays fully clickable. Fly in close and it gets out of the way; back off and it comes straight back.
- Your pointer is in its interior. A band about 6% in from each border still picks normally, so the surface is always grabbable by its edges: roughly a 1.2m band on a 20m floor.
Two ways to grab a floor when the floor really is what you're editing. Click its row in the Scene Tree, which never goes through this rule at all, or select it once: a selected plate is exempt, so its gizmo and its whole surface keep working normally while you're on it. Page objects are exempt too, since clicking the panel is how you select a page.
Window vs crossing: the drag direction matters
Like AutoCAD, the marquee behaves differently depending on which way you drag it, and the box's outline tells you which mode you're in:
| Drag… | Box | Selects |
|---|---|---|
| Left → right (window) | Solid | Only objects fully enclosed by the rectangle. Precise: nothing sticking out gets caught. |
| Right → left (crossing) | Dashed | Anything the rectangle touches, even if only clipped at the edge. Fast and greedy. |
The rectangle tests each object's real 3D footprint, so it grabs exactly what it visibly surrounds, imported models and instanced/batched objects included.
Select All and friends: the Select menu
For sweeping selections, the top bar has a dedicated Select menu, with the shortcuts you'd expect coming from other 3D tools:
| Command | Shortcut | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Select All | A | Selects every visible object in the scene. Hidden objects are skipped: you can't click them, so a sweep won't grab them either. |
| Select None | Alt+A | Clears the selection, the same as clicking an empty patch of viewport. |
| Invert Selection | Ctrl+I | Selects everything that isn't currently selected, and drops what was. |
| Select Hierarchy | None | Expands the selection downward to include every object nested under it: grab a group, get the whole group's contents. |
| Select Parent | None | Climbs one level up to the parent group of the selection. |
| Select Similar | None | Selects every object of the same type as the current selection: all meshes, all cameras, and so on. |
| By type | None | One button per kind of object the scene actually contains (Meshes, Cameras, Text, Particles, Groups…) to grab all of that type at once. |
The top of the Select menu also carries the selection mode toggle: Object (a click picks one object), Hierarchy (a click picks the whole top-level group), and Component (drops into poly edit mode). The same toggle lives in the Poly menu.
The "primary" object
When several objects are selected, the last one you added is the primary. The Properties panel and the transform gizmo act on the primary, and in the Scene Tree it's drawn a touch brighter than its companions. Shift-click a different object to make it the new primary.
The floating action bar
Select something and a small pill of buttons floats just above it in the viewport, so the moves you make most often are right where you're already looking instead of a trip to the side panels:
| Button | Does |
|---|---|
| Move · Rotate · Scale | Switches the gizmo mode, same as W/E/R. Single selection only. |
| Duplicate | Copies the selection, same as D. |
| Focus | Frames the selection, same as F. |
| Delete | Removes it (Del). |
| ⋯ | Opens the full Properties panel for this object. |
The bar gets out of your way on its own: it hides while you're dragging the gizmo, orbiting the camera, or drawing a marquee, and reappears the moment things settle. Select several objects and it drops to the shared actions: Duplicate, Focus, Delete. It's a fine-pointer feature: on a touch screen the same commands live in the long-press menu, and the pill would crowd the enlarged touch gizmo.
How selection looks
By default, selected objects get a clean outline drawn around them, and hover speaks the same language: the object under your pointer picks up that same edge rim plus a faint halo, and its surface colour is left alone. That is deliberate. A full-surface tint flicking on and off as the pointer crosses a room-sized floor is a strobe, not a hint.
Settings can switch the highlight style to a green emissive tint, or to both, and hover follows whichever you choose: ask for the tint and you get it on hover too. Hover highlighting can also be turned off entirely.
Two details that follow from the same idea: a text object keeps your own colour under the pointer and brightens only its glyph outline (selection still recolours, which is the louder cue on purpose), and a highlight is dropped the instant you start a camera drag, so it cannot stay lit on an object sliding away underneath.