Tip Tuesday: Using select other to make selections easy in Fusion 360

Keqing Song April 22, 2014

1 min read

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Select other – Press and hold left mouse button on a body

 

You didn’t really have to do all that tedious work to select something. We designed the Select Other behavior specifically for selecting those hard-to-reach areas in your design without needing to spin your model around and getting nauseous.  

 

To invoke Select Other, just press and hold the Left Mouse Button (aka LMB…without dragging!) for a second, and the Select Other dialog will pop up:

select other.png

 

As you move your cursor over the entries in this list, Fusion will select the corresponding item.  The list is ordered from front to back:

select other 2.png

 

Notice the scroll bar that lets you scroll to other entries.  The mouse wheel also will scroll the entries in the dialog. 

This is very useful when selecting geometry for Joints, which sometimes require picking geometry that you cannot see.

 

 

Selecting Parents

You can also use Select Other to select items in the component hierarchy (parent Body, Component, etc).  Simply activate the “Parents” tab of the Select Other dialog.  A list entry is presented there as well, but this list contains the chain of parent object from the item under the cursor all the way to the root of the design.  The lower-level items are at the top of the list, and the higher-level items are at the bottom.  This is an easy way to select the entire body or component that owns a face.

 

 

This usage can make selecting components for the Move command or Rigid Group much simpler than trying to find the component in the browser.

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