I’ve just learnt of a new way to expand selections in Hexagon: select some faces (or edges), then position your cursor away from the object, then hold down CMD (Mac) or CTRL (PC) and drag in any direction. The selection will grow into the direction that you drag.
It doesn’t always reliably work, because some weird algorithm is applied (I think it may depend on where next to your object you start to click and drag), but it’s another selection weapon for our Hexagon arsenal.
You can find many other selection tools under the Selection menu, such as:
- grow
- shrink
- loop
- ring
- connect / between
- invert
- 1 over n
Most of these are self explanatory, maybe except for the last one:
1 over n Selection
I’ve not found this super handy tool in any other modelling app. It allows us to select something like every other row, or every third polygon (or every n-th thing) from our current selection.
For example, we can select things like this:
To use it, make a selection as usual, say a single polygon on this sphere. Then head over to Selection – Select “1 over n” and take a look at the Properties box. Don’t worry about the fact that your selection has seemingly disappeared… it’s a “feature”.
Choose a value (say 4 for “every fourth polygon”) and hit validate. Requires a bit of experimentation and may not always give the desired results, nevertheless it can be another very handy tool in how you make selections.