Having a lot of difficulty selecting a single entity on my map
faltarego
Newcomer
Hi, all... I just purchased CC3+ today, and I'm going through the tutorial in the manual. I've gotten to the point where I've added a bunch of hills to the top left corner of my map, but I decided to digress from the tutorial for a moment, because I wanted to move a couple of the hills entities.
Not so easy. First off, I cannot see the edges of the entities, so clicking on the edge of the entity I want is a complete crapshoot. I have not yet successfully clicked on the edge of the hills I want.
I thought I'd try using a selection window to select more than I want, and then deselecting the ones I don't want (because at least I can see the edges of things that are already selected). This doesn't work either, because ctrl-clicking on the edge of one of the other hills entities doesn't de-select it. All it does is start a selection window.
I'm about ready to put my fist through a wall at this point. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. Nothing is frozen. Nothing is locked. It's just a bunch of hills on very sparsely populated map. I know there's a learning curve, but I'm following all the instructions and suggestions I've found using a Google search. Still no luck.
Thanks for indulging a newbie.
Comments
Symbols are selected by the visible edge of the symbol, not the actual outer edge of the image where the pink selection rectangle is.
Okay, that helped. I'm having slightly better luck now. It's still very tricky, especially when you have a bunch of entities together, some overlapping each other, but at least I now have a fighting chance to select what I want. I'll keep practicing. Thank you very much for replying.
To deselect entities press "N" (the shortcut for the logical "NOT" function), or right-click and then "combine"->"not"
Often you can fine tune a multiple selection by using "and(both)" from the combine menu (shortcut is "B" I think) and then using "entity type", "layer", or "color" none of which will help when picking one out of a group of hills.
What might help though is using "and(both)" and then dragging a selection window from the opposite side of the entity you want to pick.
I use these two keys a lot:
SHIFT - hold down SHIFT to select more than one by clicking each one in succession while holding the key.
CTRL - same as SHIFT, but it allows you to deselect individual items from the selection.
Oh, I didn't know about CTRL (and assumed from @faltarego's post that it was a mistake).
I've just checked - you learn something new everyday.
By the way falterego - your "selection window" when holding down CTRL is actually a deselection window, so would do what you want.
Sue, I'm not sure what holding SHIFT is doing? Clicking multiple entities adds them to the selection anyway with the default "combine>OR" selection.
You know, Raiko, you're absolutely right. SHIFT doesn't do anything in particular. I just hold it down anyway because I do it with Blender when I'm selecting all the models I've made to move them around.
I blame using too many different apps with too many different shortcuts.
Sorry falterego. Ignore what I said about SHIFT. But the CTRL keyboard shortcut is definitely a thing.