Blender Select Modes

Today’s Tutorial is by Roger Waggener, professional Blender user!

You can save time editing meshes in Blender by using the different select modes.

When you enter edit mode (by hitting tab with an object selected in object mode) the header of the 3d viewport window changes. Some things disappear, some things appear. Among the things that appear are the select mode buttons. They are three buttons that choose which select mode(s) to use. The left-most one, the vertex select mode button, has three dots on it; the middle one, the edge select mode button, has a single diagonal line on it; and the right-most one, the face select mode button, has a triangle on it.

Vertex select mode is the default and the mode that is probably what you have been using if you aren’t already familiar with this topic. When vertex select mode is active, the button with three dots on it is highlighted and you can interact with individual vertices. Vertex select mode can be very useful when you need it, but it is frequently inefficient for complex selections or many selections of different parts of a mesh.

Edge select mode can save a lot of time when you have several faces to make. Click the edge select button (the one with the line on it) and you will see that the vertex dots disappear. You can now select edges. This makes it quick and easy to move sets of two vertices at once (two vertices make an edge), but also it can speed up creating faces since instead of selecting three or four vertices to make a face, you can simply select two edges. Not only have you saved two clicks, but since edges are larger on the screen than vertices, you have saved time targeting what you want to click. (see Fitts’s Law)

By now you can probably guess what face select mode does. Face select mode is not always as useful for basic mesh editing as vertex or edge mode, but can be very efficient for loop selections and extrusions.

An interesting thing to note about the selection mode buttons is that you can shift-click them to enable more than one mode at once. In fact, you can have all three active at the same time which can make modeling very speedy, but can sometimes make it a bit fiddly to select exactly what you want if you don’t place your clicks carefully.

Try using different select modes and see how much faster you can edit your meshes.