Select tool
The four selection scopes — Object, Part, Mask and Smart — with marquee and lasso, and the combine, clipboard and grid-snap controls.
Reference
- Tool
- Select
- Panel
- Tool Options
- Section
- Selection
The Select tool decides what a marquee or a tap picks up. It has no size and no strength; what it does is governed entirely by its Scope, which chooses between selecting whole objects, lifting a region of pixels, building a paint mask, and finding a subject automatically.
Object-versus-pixel is a scope inside this tool, not a separate tool. There is no Object Select tool in the palette — to select a whole stroke, set Scope to Object; to lift a piece of the artwork, set it to Part.
Scope
Scope is the first control in Tool Options and reshapes the rest of the panel. Each scope interprets a tap and a marquee differently.
Chooses what the tool acts on: Object, Part, Mask or Smart. The controls below it change with the scope — Mode disappears under Smart, Combine appears only under Object, and the mask block appears under Mask.
Object
Selects whole strokes, fills and scene objects.
A tap selects the single nearest stroke within a 22-point screen radius; a tap that finds nothing deselects everything. A marquee selects every stroke whose projected samples fall inside the region. Scene objects and particle emitters are offered the region first, so a marquee over an emitter picks the emitter rather than the ink behind it.
Once a selection exists, a handle or the interior can be dragged to move, scale or rotate it.
Part
Lifts a region of pixels out of the artwork as a floating piece, cutting a hole where it came from. A tap behaves as an Object tap; the lift happens on a marquee.
The lift searches every target layer, groups the hits into coplanar planes, and lifts from the plane holding the most sample points inside the marquee. A lasso drawn mostly over one wall of a folded drawing therefore lifts from that wall, not from whatever happens to be nearest the camera.
Mask
Turns the marquee into a paint mask that confines subsequent brush strokes. A tap on the canvas clears the mask. This scope is covered in full on Masking.
Smart
Finds a subject's outline automatically using on-device subject detection. Nothing is uploaded and no model is downloaded.
Smart requires an image under the tap — specifically a fill carrying a photo. A tap over anything else reports that there is no photo under the tap and does nothing. Analysis runs off the main thread; only one analysis runs at a time, and a second tap while the first is still working is discarded rather than queued, so wait for the outline before tapping again.
A marquee under Smart does not select the region. It prompts the detector from the region's centroid, exactly as a tap at that point would.
Marquee and lasso
Box drags a rectangular marquee; Lasso traces a freehand region. Hidden when Scope is Smart, which has no region of its own.
A gesture counts as a tap when no point of its path ever travelled more than 6 points from where it started. The measure is the farthest distance reached, not the distance between the first and last point — a lasso that returns to its origin is still a drag.
Shown only when Scope is Smart. Lift turns the detected subject's pixels into a movable floating piece. Mask turns the subject's outline into a paint mask, confining new strokes to the subject.
Combine
Three icon buttons — replace, add and subtract — controlling how a new marquee meets the existing selection. Replace keeps only the newly matched strokes; add unions them with the current selection; subtract removes them from it.
Combine appears only under the Object scope, and it applies only to marquees. A tap always replaces the selection with the single stroke it hit, regardless of the Combine setting.
Clipboard and deletion
Copies the selection. Disabled with no selection.
Copies the selection and places the copy directly. Disabled with no selection.
Pastes the clipboard contents. Disabled when the clipboard is empty.
Clears the selection without altering the artwork.
Deletes the selected artwork. Destructive.
Snap grid to stroke
Aligns the drawing grid to the selected stroke's surface — both its plane and its curvature — so that new strokes are laid on the same wall as the selected art. Hidden under the Mask scope, and disabled unless the current selection has a surface to snap to. 3D shots only.
Make 3D
Under the Object scope, with something selected, the panel offers Make 3D — the way a drawn outline becomes a solid you can paint and sculpt. It reads out how many profile lines it found in your selection, and offers Revolve into 3D, a Keep the lines toggle, and (for a single line) Adjust axis.
It has a page of its own: see Make 3D. 3D shots only.
Build paint surface
Ink drawn across several planes — a contour drawing, a folded shape, an outline built by orbiting between strokes — describes a surface that no single flat plane represents. The Fill tool and the brush have to guess at it, and they guess wrong.
Build paint surface stops the guessing. It works out the surface your own ink describes and holds it for the tools to aim at.
Reads the ink and builds the surface. With strokes selected, it uses just those; with nothing selected, the whole active layer's ink. The button reads Rebuild paint surface once one exists. 3D shots only.
Discards the surface.
A status line above the button reads Surface ready or No surface yet, and a refusal — ink it could not read a surface from — is stated in orange rather than failing silently.
The surface is invisible and is never drawn. It is not a layer, it does not composite, and it does not appear in the Layers panel. Its only job is to be something the tools can aim at: the bucket fills on it, and the brush paints on it.
What it builds depends on what it finds:
| The ink is | The surface is |
|---|---|
| One closed loop | The surface that loop encloses, folded if the loop is. |
| Several closed loops that stack along an axis — contour rings up a cone, a vase, a limb | A skin lofted through the rings, so the drawing becomes the form it describes. |
| Several closed loops that do not stack — shapes side by side, a detail loop inside an outline | One patch per loop. A gap you deliberately left empty is never skinned over. |
| Open strokes only | A surface fitted through the points, emitted only where there is ink to support it. |
Free 3D outranks it
A stroke drawn with Free 3D on is placed at the depth you drew it, not conformed onto the paint surface. Free 3D is an explicit statement about where a stroke goes, and it wins.
The surface is saved with the shot as a reference to the strokes it was built from, and rebuilt when the shot reopens — so it survives, and it follows the ink if the ink moves.
What a selection reaches
A selection searches the active layer together with its sub-layers and its mask. This is a wider reach than the eraser and Sculpt Stroke, which stay on the active draw target alone.
Gizmo interaction
While a selection is active, a touch that lands on a gizmo handle drives the gizmo instead of starting a new marquee. Touches away from the handles marquee as usual.
The gizmo itself, and the numeric alternatives to it, belong to the Transform tool — see Transform.
QuickStrip and Sub Tool
The QuickStrip carries no sliders for Select; only the colour well is present. The Select tool has no sub-tools, and its settings are in Tool Options.
See also
Using a selection to confine brush strokes to an area.
TransformThe gizmo that moves, rotates and scales a selection.
FillThe boundary logic the mask's loop snapping reuses, and the other place Build paint surface appears.
Make 3DTurning selected profile lines into a solid.
GesturesTaps, drags and the navigation gestures that override them.