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I've been getting to know meta balls in Blender 2.82 and often find that at some point in Edit Mode, the Active Element panel goes missing for all but one element in a family. I'm trying to understand why. Retracing my steps I started again with an empty file and added just two meta balls with drivers on the X and Y locations for each. (I don't think the driver is relevant, it's just what I've messing with when this problem arose.) Somewhere along the way the Active Element panel stopped appearing for one of the balls. I began again with a second file and have now recreated everything in the first, but the Active Element panel is still working for both metaballs. Is there anything I can do to analyse the content of each file and find out what's different?

The two blend files are here on Dropbox if anyone wants to take a look: https://www.dropbox.com/s/waaw2ez4wjhbts5/AE%20Panel%20missing.blend?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/tewv7rxtka2gdxl/AE%20Panel%20present.blend?dl=0

Thanks

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I think it's working, but admittedly in a weird and unintuitive way (and there's no visual indication of what is happening), which might be considered a bug. I've submitted a fix here.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Add a metaball
  2. Deselect all (the transform panel remains present)
  3. Switch out and back into edit mode (the transform panel is gone)
  4. Select the metaball again (the transform panel returns)

enter image description here

If you are aware of how the "active" selection works with other selectable things in Blender, this behavior makes sense:

  • Only one object/element may be active at a time. In rare cases (e.g. there are no objects), there may not be an active object.
  • The active object is the "last individually select object"; that is the last one clicked on.
  • Deselection doesn't affect the active object.

If you try this same exercise with a mesh object, you get roughly the same behavior, but a rather less confusing "Nothing selected" message in the transform panel when nothing is selected.

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