I have tried the Brush select and the Laser Select tools but they don't behave like raycast in Soft. For example, to select edges, I just want to drag the mouse over many edges to select them. How?
What I find weird with the Brush Select tool is that one has to drag the mouse over a point to select its surrounding edges…

Hm, both brush and laser behave for me as expected… Mouse down, drag over some edges, release mouse, and the edges are selected. I also do not need to have the brush hit the points in order to select edges.

What Houdini version, OS, and graphics card are you using? Maybe a quick screen capture would help me understand if you are doing something differently from me?

Thanks,
Mark

grendizer
I have tried the Brush select and the Laser Select tools but they don't behave like raycast in Soft. For example, to select edges, I just want to drag the mouse over many edges to select them. How?
What I find weird with the Brush Select tool is that one has to drag the mouse over a point to select its surrounding edges…

Again, can you record screen? This is not happening to me at all.

Hey Mark,

I'm going to corner you in this thread instead of opening another, as it is something I've submitted a RFE to but if my memory serves me well I haven't got a response from support.

It has to do with the rectangle select tool for edges. Take a look in the attached image - it seems that the selection catches the edges from the other side as well (which are caught varies with the angle the camera is looking at the geo). It's almost like there's a pixel there that gets the attention of the selection rays.
Polygon selection suffers as well, but to a lesser degree - fewer polys are selected.

This is a serious issue.

p.s. Alienware 18, 2x780m SLI, win 10, H14

And here's another broken selection bit:
the first edge (or polygon) loop can't be selected w/o holding shift as well. Shift should be for addition and since there's nothing to add to, the first loop should be selected with just holding ‘a’ and MMB-ing.

Hello all, so here I'm providing the capture video of what I'm doing in Houdini to try to select edges à la “XSI Raycast”:

1) First I click Paint Select and disable “select visible geometry only”: it works exactly as expected.
2) Paint Select and enable “select visible geometry only”: nothing get selected, except when I LMB and drag on points.
3) Laser Select and disable “select visible geometry only”: nothing get selected.
4) Laser Select and enable “select visible geometry only”: nothing get selected.

So what do you think?

BTW, I can confirm the bug reported by McNistor in his post of Sat Sep 12, 2015 12:06 pm.

Thanks and see you soon,
G

I'm not experiencing what you're describing. Seems to work fine on my end, unless I somehow misunderstood your problem.

you mean if you do the same things as in my video the edges get selected?

grendizer, it works fine here on Win 7 with GeForce 770 GTX drivers 355.60

McNistor, confirmed. I get back edges selected as well.
On the second one. I can select the first edge loop with a + middelmouse fine…unless I got your post wrong.

Werner Ziemerink
On the second one. I can select the first edge loop with a + middelmouse fine…unless I got your post wrong.

I'm on H14, so that might explain this

@grendizer, I can't reproduce the issue in your video. This could easily be a video driver issue. You'll need to open the Help->About Houdini dialog, click on Show Details, and Save that info to a file. You should probably submit a bug with the info, and posting it here too would be good. Thanks.

@McNistor, I wasn't able to find the bug you mention in our database (our search tools aren't the best) - have you got a bug id for it? Or was it just something you posted on the forum?

I can say that the basic explanation for the behavior you're seeing is that the points at the ends of the edges “around the corner” are technically visible, which is why they get selected (when selecting edges we actually do a point selection as well as looking for the edges themselves). For now, if you switch from “Select Front and Back Facing” to “Select Front Facing Only” those erroneous edges should not be selected. But that setting presumably would lead to other unwanted behavior.

I was also unable to reproduce the problem you are reporting about not selecting edge loops without shift in 14.0.444… I just put down a torus, go into edge select, A+MMB-click, and the edge loop is selected. Any other hints on how to reproduce?

Thanks,
Mark

Hey Mark
The selection issue I was having (to press shift) doesn't seem to manifest itself any longer. Weird…

The RFE id is #28233 for the backside selection thing.

I hope this gets sorted out at some point.
Thanks.

Here's hoping the shift-click issue doesn't come back…

Our support department couldn't reproduce the hidden edge selection issue, so it never got promoted to an R&D bug. Since I was able to reproduce, it has now been added to the R&D bug database. I can't speculate on a timeframe for fixing though. It is likely to be a challenge to fix it without breaking other aspects of our selection. But at least its on the radar now.

Ah, I see.
It is a rather urgent matter as far as I'm concerned for any modeler and as such I hope this will get sorted out sooner rather than later since it makes “select visible geo only” kinda half-useful when in edge/poly selection mode. It makes one be wary to always check out the selection on all sides and deselect whatever is unwanted - brings back bad memories from Maya.
Anyway, godspeed.

Did you try switching to “select front facing only”? Or is that equally or even more painful?

Yep, that works fine for the little time that I've just tested it.
I'm curios, why has ‘select vis geo only’ been introduced? Is ‘front facing only’ limited or broken in some way?
‘select vis geo only’ seems to be not just buggy, but also slow - as you draw a bigger and bigger rectangle a mouse cursor slowdown occurs.

Sounds like you might have driver issues.

I keep ‘Select visible Geometry Only’ on at all times, and use w key to switch to wireframe to quickly select backfaces as well if I need to.
I find this workflow fast and high volume selections works with almost now slow down here…much faster then Softimage.

Like stated above, I do get the back edge/primitive selection problem you mentioned though.