Select all? Am I doing this wrong?

Maybe it’s my layers, or lack there of, but I can’t select all. I seen a suggestion I ’ use a keyboard, which makes me believe a simple onscreen button could be fixed, but I’m spending hours hand picking all these little pieces

There is no touchscreen command for “Select All” (although Cmd-A on the keyboard works) or a “lasso” or anything else. Or at least not yet — many people have requested the feature and they are at least considering options on how it might be best implemented.

However, I personally find the “Items” menu to be almost as fast, and in many ways, more powerful and flexible. If you really do want to select everything (perhaps to apply a color or maybe scale everything at once), just go to the top level of the “Items” menu and highlight all the folders. Or, better yet IMHO, keep your objects organized in folders (and sub-folders, sub-sub-folders, etc.) and have an easy way to select groups of desired objects with one touch.

They’ve done a very good job of the folder/layer paradigm. It is easy to drag and drop, make new sub-folders, etc. So it is quick and easy to group related items together for later selection or manipulation. Take a look at the “Electric Motor” tutorial to get some good information on this topic.

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It’s while using extrude, the items aren’t selectable, trying to select faces of a drawing

Came across this same hurdle last night - for this, instead of extruding them all at once I did a few of them and copied and pasted, by way of the move/copy fella, a small rectangle with the circles extruded then unionized the bodies. Not sure if that works for yours, though

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Good point. You obviously already know that the “Items” folders select the Whole item, but I should have mentioned that wrinkle for anyone else reading this. I have also encountered some situations where it is necessary to select multiple faces or lines, etc.

However, in fairness to Shapr3D, I can’t really think of a clear, easy-to-use method for selecting multiple faces that would be generally applicable. Perhaps if all of the items are identical, you could first select via “Items” folder, then refine by touching just the faces or lines desired on just one of the objects (which would then propagate to the all selected items). But even that approach might be better addressed by something more like the components in SketchUp.

My problem (with on-screen selection) is when you’ve gone through and selected a “bunch” of stuff and then you accidentally touch the background instead of the thing you were trying to select and then you need to start all over. (not sure how to solve that from a software perspective but the UX folks may?)

One “selection” feature I would love to see is a way to tell Shapr3D to prefer Faces or Segments while doing a bunch of selections. Or maybe a better approach would be if the majority of selected things are faces then prefer a face selection or similar for segment selection. Obviously, you want to be able to select both at any time but what I mean is when the pick could be one or the other. I am sure it is a tricky balance to get that tuned just right but seems like it would be very helpful from the clumsy like me.

@Yepher if you lose your selection by tapping at an empty space, hitting the undo button will reselect the lost group :slight_smile:

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That is the best Shapr3D tip I have ever received. THANK YOU!!!

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@KPeter I never thought of that! That would’ve saved me some serious frustration!