In this lesson video, we are going to discuss how to do basic object selection in blender and a very important concept in Blender called the active object. If you use Blender prior to version 2.8, you might already accustomed to use the right mouse button to select objects. Since Blender 2.8, the default mouse input to select objects has changed to left click, some people may like these changes and some people may not. In this course, we are going to stick with the default to make everything easy for all of us. Okay, so to select objects, First, make sure this tool up here which is the Select mode is active. We will discuss the rest of these two modes in later lessons.
To select this light object, for example, we can left click on it, we can tell that the object is selected by this orange highlight color. This object is actually a camera object, we can click on it also to select it. Notice when we select an object, the previous selected object will be selected automatically. Okay, so clicking will get you on object selection. Now what if we want to select multiple objects in blender, there are many ways to do this. One simple method that we can do is by performing a click drag like this.
Every objects that are inside the rectangular bounding box will get selected when we release the mouse. If you need more precision, you can use the shift modifier key. For example, we can select this light object again, then press and hold the shift key, then click on this camera object. Notice we just select that object but the previous selected object is still selected. We can shift click again on this cube object. So now we have A total of three objects selected.
To clear or to select all objects, we can simply left click or click drag on any empty area in the viewport. But if you prefer a shortcut, you can press out a to dislike all. If you forget the shortcut, you can go to the Select menu in the 3d viewport header, and then select None in here. As you can see, the shortcut is our a, we can also see that there is a shortcut to select all. And also there is Ctrl a shortcut to select invert. So let's try these shortcuts.
Now. Press A to select all objects in the scene of a to unselect all and if we click to select this cube object, and then press Ctrl I, now the selection get inverted. Everything is now selected except the cube object. Okay, another one To clear the selection is by pressing a twice quickly. So again, to deselect all objects in the scene, you can either use our a, or you can tap a letter key twice quickly. When selecting multiple objects using the shift key method, you may notice that the left selected objects always have different highlight color, it is brighter or more yellowish, while the others are still orange, not only in the viewport, but you can also see the colors in the Outliner.
This one is bright yellowish orange, while the others are darker orange. This yellow color indicates that this object is now the active object. Okay, so what is actually active object? Well just assume that the active object is the current main object or the focus object because there can only be one active object in the scene. This active object concept is very important later when we discuss more advanced topics such as advanced transformation, joining objects, rigging, etc. For now, we just need to know that this yellow highlighted selection is the active object, okay, besides the color.
Another way to tell which object is the active object is by checking the properties editor. From this tab and below, the parameters are all showing the active object which is currently the camera object. You can also tell which object is the active object from the status bar down here, you can see the word camera down here. This is actually the name of the active object. Now, if you don't see the status bar down here, it may have been turned off accidentally. To turn it back on, you can go to the Window menu up here, and then make sure this show status bar option is on Now notice if we hold SHIFT and click again, on another selected object, the active object title is now given to this object.
But notice if we hold SHIFT and click again on the active object, that object will get be selected. It is still the active object, but not selected anymore. So yes, you can have an object active but not selected. But most of the time, an active object is a selected object. So again, generally speaking, clicking and shift clicking on an object will make that object the active object, but if you shift click on the active object, that object will get selected, even though it is still technically the active object.