In 3Ds Max, there are many shortcuts when selecting different objects. I will talk about a few of the main important ones that you should know.
Keyboard Short-Cuts
By holding ‘Control’, you can add additional objects to your selection. By holding ‘Alt’, you can remove objects from your selection. If you select a few objects, like two from your scene, by holding ‘Control I’ this will deselect your current selections and select all the other objects that were unselected. So, it will inverse your selection and can be very handy when modelling in 3Ds max. If you would like to select all of the objects in your scene, you can press ‘Control A’. Or instead, you can also go to ‘Edit’ > ‘Select All’ and it will also remind you of the shortcut (‘Control A’) to the right.
Freeze Selection
Another instruction you can do is freeze a selection. Once you have clicked on an object and made it selected, you can right click and then press ‘Freeze Selection’. This doesn’t disable you from selecting anything else, it just disables you from selecting the object you froze.
Lock Selection
Lastly, you can lock your selection. So if you click on an object, you can press ‘Space’ on your keyboard and now you are not able to select anything else and this is the only thing selected in your scene. This may be handy when you are modelling and you want only one thing selected. For example, when you are applying materials, textures or editing an object. Instead of pressing ‘Space’, you can click the lock icon at the bottom and it does the same thing.
Hopefully you found this blog helpful and if you would like to see a more in depth video tutorial, it will be linked below.
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