Select via Material ID

[glorybound]

I have my site all carved out and each material is on its own Material ID. Now, I want to select all but one of the Material ID's, so I can level it out. How do I select more that one Material ID? Everything is welded, so when I flatten the road, sidewalk, and driveways out, the grass should move with it.

[glorybound]

I guess I don't have to select more than one, and from what I see anyway, you can't. I ended up just flattened the whole area, which is what they would probably do anyway.

[Joelaff]

This is a regular Edit Poly or Mesh object with multiple polygon IDs? You can enable polygon mode, then in the rollout where you set IDs uncheck the checkbox to "Clear Selection" (which deselects the existing selection when you select a new ID) and you can select however many IDs you would like. If you want all but one it may be easiest to select that one you don't want and then invert the selection. Note that once you assign a Multi/Sub-Object Material to an object you can then use the popup menu in that same ID rollout to select polys, and you can even name the different IDs by going into the Material Editor and entering names for the different IDs in the Multi/Sub-Object node settings.

You could also make named selection sets of polygons to re-select certain polys later.

Or is this something completely different?

[glorybound]

Interesting, I'l check it out. I was going to look to see how you name selections.

[Joelaff]

Interesting, I'l check it out. I was going to look to see how you name selections.

Yeah, it's kinda weird that naming them in the Multi/Sub-Object material settings names them in the object. But if you assign another (say a VRayMtl rather than a multi/sub) material to the object then the names go away. In fact I think that little popup only works if the object has a multi/sub applied.

You can always select by number with the little text entry box, though.