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Trouble with selection tools
#1
Hi all,

Just installed 2.10.4 to try retexturing the radio from Fallout 4 (although I have a few other things in mind too) and am very confused about a particular operation.  None of the many tutorials I read/watched helped out so hopefully someone here can.

Anyways, the DDS for the radio has a couple sections with quite thick woodgrained borders (for the wooden case of the radio) that I'd like to turn into solid colours.  The tools for selecting area via colour don't work very well, I think because of the woodgrain.  So I used the "free select" selection tool (the magic scissors were much to inaccurate) to highlight the outer border then hit Enter to get the marching ants.  So far so good, although around corners I had to use quite of few of those "connector nodes" (hope you know what I mean) while zoomed way in to make nice curves.  But, when I tried using that tool to highlight the inner border (i.e. I want the selection area to be the woodgrainy space between them), hitting Enter made the initial (outer border) disappear. 

I muddled around and eventually discovered that keeping CTRL pressed while making the second (inner border) selection made it possible (sometimes) to save the second selection without the first one disappearing.  So I was eventually able to make both borders and "bucket fill" the area inside them with a solid colour.

The problems: it took me ages to get this done because (i) most of the time, even keeping CTRL pressed resulted in the first selected border (marching ants) to disappear and I'd have to start over (I at least saved the file after doing the first border), and (ii) sometimes, seemingly related to having CTRL pressed, I had little control of placing the nodes.  I could only place them way higher or lower than I wanted.  That was also hit and miss, and starting over often corrected the problem  I'm actually guessing that all that is somehow related to the number of nodes I used.  I only got done by keeping the number of nodes to a minimum.   Which kinda sucked since around corners I like to use a lot of nodes/lines to make the curves smooth.

Although I got it done in the end, it was more ragged than I would have liked.  But I can't help but feel like I'm missing something obvious.  Surely there has to be an easier way?  Almost every tutorial I saw just explained how to make an outline and then edit whatever's inside.  But, in my case, I only want to change a portion of what's inside the initial selection so have to make another one.  I have a feeling that this must be a very common operation so, yeah... help?!  I don't think I can go through that again.

Anyways, hope that all made sense.  I can post an image of the dds if that would help.
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Messages In This Thread
Trouble with selection tools - by KevKiev - 07-22-2018, 09:38 PM
RE: Trouble with selection tools - by Ofnuts - 07-22-2018, 10:24 PM
RE: Trouble with selection tools - by Fifi - 08-02-2021, 11:02 AM
RE: Trouble with selection tools - by rich2005 - 08-02-2021, 11:07 AM
RE: Trouble with selection tools - by KevKiev - 07-23-2018, 12:36 AM
RE: Trouble with selection tools - by rich2005 - 07-23-2018, 08:50 AM
RE: Trouble with selection tools - by Blighty - 07-23-2018, 09:47 AM
RE: Trouble with selection tools - by KevKiev - 07-23-2018, 12:30 PM
RE: Trouble with selection tools - by Ofnuts - 07-23-2018, 06:01 PM
RE: Trouble with selection tools - by KevKiev - 07-24-2018, 12:19 AM

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