Cinema 4D Program Documentation Reference Cinema 4D Basic Features Select Menu
Function available in CINEMA 4D Prime, Visualize, Broadcast, Studio & BodyPaint 3D

Selection Filter

Use this menu to choose which types of object can be selected in the viewport (by default, all object types are selectable).

Enable an option to enable selection for that object type, or disable the option to prevent selection.

These options are especially useful when you are working with large projects. Suppose there are dozens of lights, cameras, bones, polygon objects and splines in the scene and currently you are working on the polygon objects. To make it easier to select the polygon objects in the viewport, disable all options on the Selection Filter menu apart from Polygon. Then you will be able to select polygon objects only in the viewport.

The names of any Selection objects you have set up will also appear in this menu. Select the name of a Selection object to quickly select that entire group of objects.

You can still select objects in the Object Manager even if their object types are disabled. The Selection Filter refers to selections in the viewport only.

Select Tool

Use this tool to select like objects or like tags. For example, you can select all lights, all nulls or all Material tags. After choosing the command, the Select Tool dialog opens. There are two pages in this dialog: one for objects and one for tags.

Suppose you have ten lights in your scene set to the same brightness and arranged around a car. You want to adjust the brightness because the render is too bright. First you need to select all the lights, and you can do this quickly by enabling Light in the Select Tool dialog. Likewise, you might want to select and then hide all deformation objects once you are done editing them, or select all Target tags and then make them point at the same object, and so on.

Each option has three states: disabled, enabled and semi-enabled. To change an option’s state from disabled to enabled or vice versa, click the option’s box. Enabling an option selects all objects of that type, disabling deselects them. For example, to select all lights, enable Light. To deselect them again, disable the option. The three states are shown below — in this case, for the Polygon option.

Disabled. All Polygon objects are deselected.

Enabled. All Polygon objects are selected.

Semi-enabled: One or more, but not all, Polygon objects are selected.

When you see the semi-enabled state, it means that some — but not all — objects of that type are already selected. Click a semi-enabled option to disable it, and click again to enable it.

When using the Select Tool, you can still select objects in the viewport and Object Manager. The options in the Select Tool dialog update to reflect the changes to the selection.

Restrict to Active Objects

Enable this option if you want to select like tags of the selected objects only, rather than all like tags in the scene. For example, suppose you have ten characters in the scene, each with many Material tags, and you want to select the Material tags of Bob and Lisa only. In the Object Manager, or in the viewport, select Bob and Lisa. On the Tags page of the Select Tool dialog, enable Restrict To Active Objects and enable Texture. Only those Material tags belonging to Bob and Lisa will be selected. The other tags will be ignored.