3D Selection Vault

Gravitational Group Selection

Also known as Directional dragging, Anchoring and grouping

Desktop 3D modelling: click an object and drag to select it together with everything resting on it, using a contact graph built from gravity.

How it works

A collision detector builds a contact graph of what supports what. Clicking an object and dragging selects it with all objects it supports; the drag direction (directional dragging) or anchors placed on objects to exclude (anchoring and grouping) decide which side-by-side neighbours join the group. Dragging further moves the whole group.

Papers

• Ji-Young Oh, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, Darius Dadgari (2006). Group Selection Techniques for Efficient 3D Modeling. IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI), pp. 95–102 doi:10.1109/VR.2006.66