Selecting overlapping items

[Peter Bennison]

Successive highlighting and info display of overlapping items works fine with the Tab key, but the previous selection(s) remains obstinately selected as well, which effectively makes modification of only one of the overlapping items impossible using this method ?

[Djordje]

Peter wrote:
Successive highlighting and info display of overlapping items works fine with the Tab key, but the previous selection(s) remains obstinately selected as well, which effectively makes modification of only one of the overlapping items impossible using this method ?

Hm?

Should not ... check your video drivers. Which card do you have in the Mac?

[Dwight]

And if phantom selection dots persist, the sure-fire way to check on the number of elements selected is the selected element list in the info box.

[Djordje]

Does a redraw, pan, or zoom clear it?

[Link]

You're not holding shift down, right?

Cheers,
Link.

[Peter Bennison]

Thanks for your replies.

Well - what I do is select the first element by click and shift in the usual way and "1 item" is displayed in info box. Then I keep shift engaged (otherwise I cant select anything, right ?) and use tab to scroll through the overlapped items, each new item is selected and highlighted with its attributes and each time "1 item" is displayed in info box as it should be. BUT as soon as I right click to try and modify the attributes of the current selection the info box changes to "2,3,4 whatever items" and they all get modified at once, exactly what I don't want.

I can work around this using layers or 3d views, but this is a problem for me. I'm sure I could do this in 9 just by repeat clicking.

Today I am working on an Intel Core Duo Imac 20" 2ghz 1go, it has an ATI Radeon X1600 128mo video card. Still on AC10 1010 Fr.

Thanks, Peter

[Link]

Shift selecting will always add to the selection if the element is not yet selected, or remove from the selection if the element is already selected. Furthermore if you are not in the Arrow tool when you are selecting, the Info Box will only show how many of the last selected elements you have. So if you are in the slab tool, and have three slabs selected then shift select a wall, the info box will only show 1 wall selected even though you have three slabs selected as well. This is a little confusing at first but is quite a neat feature once you get the hang of it.

Let's say you're in the Arrow tool and you 'swipe' over three slabs and a wall and the Info Box shows the Wall tool with 4 items selected. If you want to edit just the wall, you can click on the Wall tool in your info box and once opened the dialog will say Selected: 1 Editable:1, so you are only making changes to the wall, not the slabs (even though they are selected). You could also double click on the Wall tool in the Toolbox to get to the same settings.

Similarly, if you have the same four items selected and the wall tool is active in the info box and want to edit the slabs, could just double click the Slab tool in the Toolbar. Or you could just shift select the slab to remove it from the selection, shift select it again to add it to the selection. Doing that will make the slab tool active in the info box, so you can edit the slab settings from there.

I would recommend escaping out to your arrow tool and then do your selecting. In the Arrow tool, the info box will show all the elements you have selected. And, the info box will change to show the last selected item, but the numbers will remain accuurate for the total amount of selected items.

Hopefully that was more helpful than confusing. I'm hanging over a little today after Chritsmas celebrations.

Cheers,
Link.