Object Selection – Part 1

when working with objects in AutoCAD you will need to select items that are already there most drawings will require that you select something there are many different ways to select objects and to make sure you are selecting the right one when you’re using an editing command you will see a prompt on the command line that says select objects so if we have a circle
and we want to do something to it like copy the command prompt on the command line and in your dynamic input say select objects they are all listed here but there are over a dozen options or so for you to be able to choose from when you want to make a selection you know for an object or objects one method is to pick the object we’ve selected it you can tell you’ve selected it because it’s been highlighted and dashed I can zoom in here but it still has the same type of dashed spacing that’s been selected now if i press Escape key i cancel my command and it’s been unselected that’s pretty straightforward and when there’s only one or two objects it’s pretty easy to go and literally pick everything so let’s start the copy command pick it press enter now since we’re copying I need a base point and now I tell it where to place it
now i have several circles
my command press ENTER to close off the copy command now what if i want to pick while all of these or maybe just you know these three so if i want to copy it again or in this case let’s say I want to erase
I need to select my objects i can pick on one at a time
and enter
control-z is a great way to quickly undo something or you can comp to your quick access toolbar so the more objects you have to pick the more you have to click now remember my theory on CAD here is that the less you do the more you can get done so two methods you can use here would be to use a window or a crossing window method okay so let’s say we want to erase again press Enter or the erase command is right here on the ribbon now I can pick all of these objects with just two clicks or i can pick them one at a time
as you hover your mouse over an object to be selected AutoCAD will highlight it said hey this is what you’re picking that’s how you know that you’re picking the right object or not one thing you can do is call a window I pick a point here in just in space and you can see I have two different colored windows this is your window selection method and there are two methods right here available to us as they move my mouse to the right
up or down of my first point I get a blue box with a solid boundary around it this is your window selection anything that is fully enclosed inside that window will be selected so I’m going to get this circle and this circle in my selection watch there you go see they were the only ones that were completely enclosed in that blue square area that’s your window now the other option was a crossing window selection so i can pick somewhere
and when I move to the left of that selection up or down I get a green box with a dashed line now that means that anything that’s completely inside that square will be picked as well as anything that square crosses through so now I’m going to pick this circle this circle this circle and then this one on the bottom the only one that’s
completely enclosed in my rectangular shape is the bottom circle but yet all four will be selected they will be added to my selection of these other two objects
these are your two main selection methods your window and you’re crossing window the third one is probably the individual object selection itself so you can very quickly pick everything with two clicks that’s very handy sometimes though you have to get fancy and you want to pick just the right objects if you want to select all the objects in your file for whatever reason you can just start your command
then type in the word all
this will pick everything and it will tell you on the command line how many objects you found or were selected in this case there’s eight so that’s another way another really cool
selection method works just like you’re crossing window selection but instead of a polyline or square or rectangle it’s just a straight line so you start your command and hit the letter F for fence press ENTER and now you just connect the dots pick anywhere and you have this crossing line anywhere that crossing line goes the object will be selected so I can pick these three objects
going to ignore this one pick that one and that one so everywhere that line goes through those are the objects that I’m going to select and the other three that I haven’t crossed through with my fence won’t be picked I press ENTER and they’re gone so when you are in a tight configuration or you have a lot going on you can use the fence option set control Z again to undo that erase now this works just like the crossing window except that you make a line not a box there’s another one called the W polygon and the C polygon methods these create a windowed or crossing polygon so it’s kind of a hybrid of your crossing window or window selection with the fence these methods will allow you to create a multi-sided object as your selection area instead of a box and all honesty and fairness though I almost never use these methods myself because the window the crossing the fence and the single selection will fit almost all of my needs but we’ll try them out anyway just to demonstrate press erase and then WP now you just draw your polygon so I can draw a really crazy shape as you can see anything inside
will be selected and right now I have nothing that’s inside my window because I’ve made a weird shape so now the only thing that’s going to be erased will be the circle here
so that’s the wp selection the other selection option is the C polyline for crossing window polygon by type in CP now you can see I have my selection options here anything that crosses through will be picked
there you go and as you saw there as one I can use any combination of these selection methods I can keep adding to my selection until I’ve picked
everything I need so sometimes you may want to just pick an object pick an object and they do a window whatever your needs might be and then you can do a fence etc but sometimes sometimes you pick too many things and you need to remove these items from your selection it happens it happens all the time there are two ways to do this once you’ve made your selection let’s just say I’ve picked everything and I say I need to take the one out right in the middle this guy how do i get rid of it hit the letter R for remove press enter and now pick now it’s out of my selection you see it’s not highlighted it’s not dashed everything else here is now you have to turn this feature off though if you want to add more items and you can use all of your regular selection methods that you use to add things to it with
so you hit our for remove and now you want to type a for ad so now that I’ve typed in a for ad I can start adding objects back to my selection set that’s one method the our method the second method which is my preferred method is to just hold down the shift key so again if I have everything picked i press and hold the shift key and then I just pick my other objects let go the shift key and I can start adding objects back I like that because i only have to do a couple of steps and i can do it on the fly so i can remove remove oh let go the shift key and start adding again so your shift key is very helpful there there are many times when you make a selection and finish a command and now you need to use that same selection set for whatever reason so let’s say I’m going to copy these three circles press Enter
and I’ve copied them
I want to delete those three or you know what I need to copy some more of those objects start the copy command again press enter then the hit P P will select your previously selected objects that’s very nice I don’t have to figure out exactly which ones that I picked before I can just start back where I was you’re going to find that selecting the right object is difficult and this could be because there are several objects on top of each other or that they’re just so close to each other you can’t get the right one so let’s start the copy command again and I’m going to go with the previous
I’m going to pick the center of this circle i’m going to add them on top of these sets of circles
now which one do I want to delete I don’t want to delete both of them but I want to delete the other one there are a couple of different ways that you can do this you can cycle through the objects which is what you want to do to do this place your crosshair over the object just like I’ve done here you’ll see it highlighted and then hold the shift key down and press the spacebar you can see it kind of flash is there that will toggle through the different objects so you’ll get to pick the one that you want you can also turn on what’s called selection cycling which is right here and your status bar turn that on and when you hover over objects that have more than one object on top or
underneath you’ll get that little blue glyph that you see in it in the top right corner of my crosshairs it says hey there’s more than one object here so when I pick the object it will say hey there are two circles which one do you want you pick the one you want
and start your command and now there are only two objects here
one way to test if there are more than one object over the top of each other is by just selecting them you can select objects before you start your command that’s also useful work whichever way you want I find that I have developed a work habit of selecting objects then performing my command you can do it either way it really doesn’t make much difference
when i select here I
object and I know I only have one object because I’ve moved it if you execute a command like copy or erase and you pick it it says one object found now if I go here si tu found three total so I have three objects in total select it and as I add to that selection the total increases if you press the f2 button you’ll get your text screen here and we’ll show you how many you have selected so you’ll know what’s going on remember you can select your objects before you start your command or you can start the command and then select it it’s up to you