In this very short tutorial I will show you a little known Blender selection tool that can turn out to be very useful. It is the Select Active tool, available in both Previous and Next modes.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this very short tutorial I will show you a little known Blender selection tool that can turn out to be very useful. It is the Select Active tool, available in both Previous and Next modes.
This tool is located in the More / Less submenu of the Select menu in the header of the 3D Viewport, in Edit Mode, and it works with selections of vertices, edges, or faces.
In particular, in Next mode the tool derives the selection criterion from the last two elements and tries to replicate it to perform new selections. On screen I am showing an example using the shortcut for Next mode, which is the key combination Control Shift and the plus key on the numeric keypad.
You can also use the tool once, either from the menu or with the shortcut, and then apply it again using the key combination SHIFT R, which is the shortcut to repeat the last operation, whatever it was.
As you can see from the simple examples I am showing on screen, this tool makes it easy to create some selections that would take much longer if done manually.
The tool remembers the last criterion, which might seem like a major limitation, but it is actually quite flexible. For example, look at how the selection of unconnected edges with different orientations is replicated and treated as a single topological criterion.
I am now showing a similar example with a selection on vertices. These are selections that would take a bit of time to perform manually.
The Previous Active mode instead allows you to deselect based on the topological criterion. Described this way, with a simple example, it might seem similar to the Undo operation, but there is a substantial difference because Previous Active remembers the last selection even after other operations have been performed. Let’s look at a practical example.
I created a selection with Next Active, replicating the selection criterion, and then extruded the selected elements. If I now wanted to deselect the last elements, I could not use Undo because that would undo the extrusion. However, I can use Previous Active, which keeps track of the selection criterion even after other operations, allowing me to reduce the selection and then apply the extrusion or other operators again.
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