Selection Techniques

The Select Parents and Select Children keyboard shortcuts can be very useful when used together. For instance, if you have one side of a triangle selected, you can quickly select all three sides as follows:

1. Select the two adjacent vertices using the keyboard shortcut for Select Parents: Ctrl+U (Windows) or z+U (Mac).

2. Select all three sides using the keyboard shortcut for Select Children: Ctrl+D (Windows) or z+D (Mac).

Thus with one side selected you can quickly select all three sides by holding down the Ctrl or z key and pressing the keys U and then D. Similarly, with one side selected you can quickly select all three vertices by holding down the Ctrl or z key and pressing the keys U, D, and U.

The selection rectangle also provides a way of selecting several objects at once, and makes possible some useful shortcuts. Shown below are two common cases in which using a selection rectangle is significantly easier than clicking on the objects individually.

Select segment and point before constructing perpendicular.

Select 3 sides and no vertices before constructing midpoints.