Border/box select only what is inside box.

Hi all. This is my third thread in days about developing new features for Blender.
(I sleep reassured this must mean I am finally getting my head into helping out hacking on this lovely program)

I just want to know before I go full into it, if it a “include only what is inside” mode for border select tool has been discussed?

While the selection tool in blender are powerful they seem a bit confusing… Object mode has different behavior than edit mode etc.

I would like to have the ability for the object box select tool to only include what is inside. Just like the edit mode tool.
It would be more consistent and is very very useful.

Are there any objections or reasons why this is not implemented?
It seems a trivial feature to me.

Not entirely sure what you mean, but I assume you don’t want the border select to select if an object is only partially inside the selection rectangle, but rather if it’s fully inside?

In editmode, it’s always based on centers. If you are in face selection mode, the face dot / center is used to determine whether it is inside the selection rectangle or not. For vertices, the center is the vertex location, thus it’s either fully inside or fully outside the rect, so it looks as though it used fully-inside geometry only.

In object mode it doesn’t use the origin, but the outline / silhouette of the object and selects if a single bit is inside the rect, which makes quite some sense - using the origin would be bad for everything asymmetrical or if the mesh data isn’t centered around the origin, and not selecting an object although 3/4 of it were in the rect would be confusing too.

Would be a nice addition however if it border select had an option to only select what is fully inside.

Exactly so.

In many CAD programs when drawing the selection box from left to right it select everything inside only and right to left everything it touches. It works very well and intuitive. Imo lots of programs could benefit from using this. Even Adesk AI does not have this feature and it is a pain to select overlapping geometry where the box select tool selects everything it touches…
Maybe it is something with patents or… I dont know…

I guess in blender it would make more sense to make some key trigger the mode while using the box. That is how most blender tools work.

I’m sorry for the bump, but I just thought about this myself and I may have an additional idea that could contribute to this.

In adittion to being able to choose between a box select mode that includes all touching objects and all contained. I wonder if it’s also a good idea to be able to expand its deselecting capabilities ( MiddleMouseButton ).

Say for instance I want to deselect all objects OUTSIDE of the boxed region.

I often find myself using box deselect 4 times to shave off all the objects/walls/props/cameras I didn’t want in my previous box select, and that happens a lot… almost all the time.
Putting it into perspective, I even dare say that a BIG portion of my time is spent on deselecting all the stuff I didn’t want selected. It’s a bit sad to waste your time on that.

I’m tempted to have a go at this though. Might be usefull