Hi. New user to Houdini here. Started with Apprentice and liked it enough to move on to Indie.

I'm sure this will eventually become motor-memory and not a big deal but one of the most frustrating user interface issues for me has been doing something as simple as selecting an edge loop. First of all, it changed from “L” in the getting started tutorials to A and Shift A with a middle mouse click. So I had to go to the internet for an answer. The worst part was trying to select the edge loop and then figure out how to select another edge loop. It must have taken me 3 or 4 tries to get the right combination of shifting and clicking and a scream of “arghhhh!” before I got it. I still occasionally mess it up and accidentally deselect all of my loops.

So my question is… is there any functional reason why I can't simply double click on an edge while in edge selection mode to have it select the entire loop? Same with primitives selection mode. As far as I can tell, double clicking currently does nothing. So, why not make double-clicking on an edge or face allow it to select the entire loop? It seems to me this would not only be more immediately intuitive but much easier for additional loop selections (just hold shift while double-clicking on another edge). Again, new user here so there may be some functional reason that I'm just not aware of yet that would prevent using a double-click for loop selection.

If there is a way for me to custom configure this in my Hotkeys preferences that would also be cool but I don't see anywhere that it's possible to assign a double-click as an option.

Thanks.

Can you please add what your previous 3d experience is too. I think I've heard this double clicking comes from Modo or 3dsMax.

I've used Maya and, more recently, Blender. Maya works by double-clicking (left mouse button) on an edge, while in edge selection mode.

Blender is alt-click while in edge selection mode. I find the Maya way to be the most intuitive and wish that were standard in all 3D programs.

I'm sure it mostly comes down to preference and I'd be perfectly happy with it that way if I could somehow modify it in the hotkeys preference to work the way I prefer. But again, it doesn't seem possible to specify a double-click as a “hotkey” preference in Houdini.

Go there => http://forums.odforce.net/topic/21864-houdini-14-hotkeys-discussion-forked-from-h14-announcement-thread/ [forums.odforce.net] <= and cry, loudly!

It's in Modo too, and it's very handy.

hmm… that discussion is a little discouraging. I fear it's the age-old battle between long-time “hardcore” users of a product and new users who come at it with frustration and the seeming lack of an intuitive way of doing things.

I saw this in the Blender community - a program that is extremely difficult to use until you've memorized hundreds of commands because they lack graphical icons for nearly every function. It was especially rough in areas where there was inconsistency with the way you would perform a similar function but in different areas of the program. It felt slapped together and hodge-podge (which, I'm sure, it was).

It was interesting to see a long-time user of Blender (blenderguru.com) come around and realize one day that as he was getting frustrated with the inconsistencies and difficulties using it himself, he realized he had always just dismissed new user complaints about it as lack of experience that they would eventually come to like. That's not the case. He ended up making a two-video discussion on his youtube channel about all of the inconsistencies and difficulties for Blender that, if they weren't addressed, would continue to push away any new users and they would be left with no bigger user base than those “hard core” long time users who essentially grew up with the program.

I've always been a fan of software developers cherry picking the best, most intuitive method of doing things. For me, I can't imagine how double clicking an edge would not be considered easier, more intuitive and superior to the current method for a first time user trying to figure out how to expand his selection beyond just one edge. But… there we are. I saw one guy in that thread thinking it was unimaginable that the current method isn't considered superior to double-clicking (meanwhile, I'm thinking “WTF?!!” to that). So, only solution seems to be allowing us to somehow customize it with hot keys so those who think the current way is easier can have their way, and those of us who prefer the double-click method can have ours.