Trouble selecting correct object in viewport

Question

After switching from Maya to Blender I noticed that I can't select meshes as precisely as in Maya.

In Maya you select exactly what you clicked on, it doesn't matter how far the object is from the camera, you always get what you clicked on. In Blender it's fairly hard to select a specific mesh among other meshes, it seems Blender is trying to "help" me and correct my selection (like auto-aim in FPS games on console). I spend too much time trying to select the right mesh. Its not only time consuming, but also very annoying. I have to switch between shaded and wireframe modes, sometimes use strong zoom and hide functions to select the right mesh.

Is there a way to switch this "auto-aim" selection off? I would like to be able to select meshes just like in any other 3D program, by clicking exactly on them.

Answer 1

You can also try changing the selection mode under User Preferences. There are two options available now for selection.

• OpenGL Select
• OpenGL Occlusion Queries

OpenGL Occlusion Queries is the newer, and faster method which seems to work better on AMD Radeon GPUS.

You can also use shift+b to draw-out a rectangular selection that will cause the view to zoom in on the selected location. Picking objects tends to work better when you are zoomed in closer.

shift+c will zoom out out to fit the scene. Using these two shortcuts, you can quickly navigate to whatever object you would like to select and work on.

Answer 2

There are multiple ways to go about this problem;

The ones I would recommend are to either Alt + RMB (depending on your setting for selection, you might want to use LMB), which shows you a list of all the objects under the mouse and you can use to select - however you need to know the name of the object;

There other way is to press Ctrl + RMB which selects the object which's origin is closer to the mouse cursor, ignoring the depth check - meaning you can select an object through any other, using this method.

Answer 3

Blender cycles through all the objects considered under the cursor when you click LMB (or whatever you are using for selection) multiple times.

In this example I'm repeatedly clicking on the front Suzanne in the view on the left. As you can see, it cycles through selecting all the objects behind under the cursor:

As mentioned by someonewithpc, you can get a list of all the objects being cycled through with ⎇ Alt LMB.

Answer 4

One way (in Edit Mode) is to place your cursor over the mesh you wish to select and press L.

I would refer you to this link as well:

Selecting - how to differentiate "elements"?