Additional face selection tool

Its very hard to select all outer faces to hide them. I wouldn’t mind an option ‘select all ajoining faces’. in a very simple example, if I had a pipe with many wall faces I could hide the two ends and the select an outer face (there maybe hundreds of outer faces) then select this tool to select all outer faces, furthermore I could use invert selection to then select the inner faces.

This would be very advantageous for complex geometries. I first though of this when I tried selecting all outer faces of an automotive radiator with all its fins… very time consuming. I could have broken the faces up by hiding the inlet and outlet ends and used the process described above.

Just food for thought to try reduce preprocessing times!
Kind regards,
Darren Lynch

Hello Darren (@1318980),

could you also reduce the time to select all of those outer faces if you could use a rubberband selection tool? Another possibility could be to change the selection mode to select every face on “hover” and not by clicking. I am thinking of alternative solutions as for a “all adjacent faces”-selection this information needs to be available in the memory for all faces in the viewer, computing this on the fly would take too long I guess, which might cause performance problems as well. I will check on the possibility to do so.
Are you referring to a public project of yours? If yes could you post the project page link here?

Best Alex

Hi @afischer

From your suggestions, I think this project is a better example: https://www.simscale.com/workbench?publiclink=01a9bb9d-e431-44c3-8953-7b667be35f97

Open the mesh for mechanical analysis, the objective here is to make face sets on the inner faces. Firstly I’ll need to hide all other faces (or put myself in the tank which is awkward).

With a rubber band tool:

  • Hide the fuel sender
  • set first position (top down) and rubberband
  • remove accidently selected faces and add missed faces
  • Change view and repeat
  • hide all selected face
  • get to work with face sets

With the hover tool

  • Hide the fuel sender
  • set first position (top down) and select all visible faces
  • remove accidently selected faces and add missed faces
  • Change view and repeat
  • hide all selected face
  • get to work with face sets
    (pretty much same steps)

With adjacent tool:

  • Hide fuel sender and hole face
  • select an outer face and hide
  • get to work with face sets

The first two are a lot quicker than my current options, however, the last one will obviously reduce time spent on hiding outer faces to a couple of clicks which is obviously my preference :slight_smile: but anything that could take repetition out of my workflow I will support! The actual face grouping would be quicker using the rubber band though.

Kind regards,
Darren Lynch

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Hey Darren,

thanks for the detailed feedback. I’ll have a look at the project as well. Let’s see what we can do short-term and long-term to improve the issues.

Best Alex

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