Pickwalk for Blender

PickWalk is an add-on for Blender which lets you navigate through a hierarchy of objects or bones of an armature, similar to how pickwalking works in Autodesk Maya.

It also allows for walking over vertices and points of meshes and curves in edit mode.

Pickwalk extends the basic navigation of Blender in the outliner and makes it much more powerful. The default navigation in Blender is limited to the outliner and jumping between different hierarchy levels can sometimes skip objects.

The add-on works in the 3D View, Outliner, Graph Editor and Dope Sheet.

Watch the Overview Video

Compatibility

Blender 2.93 and later

Version

0.6.0

Installation

1. Download the add-on as a ZIP-file.
2. Open the Blender Preferences window by choosing Edit > Preferences…
3. Select the Add-ons tab.
4. Press Install… and select the downloaded ZIP file. After successful installation the add-on should be visible in the list.
5. Activate the add-on.

Usage

Keymaps are assigned automatically when loading the add-on and are available in the 3D View, Outliner, Graph Editor and Dopesheet.

• The Ctrl key is used as a general modifier to access the pickwalking.
• The Shift key expands the current selection.
• The Alt key tries to find the same object on the opposite side of the hierarchy based on a side identifier.

Note for macOS users

The pickWalk keymaps conflict with the default key assignments for mission control in the system’s preferences. You need to disable these in System Preferences > Mission Control and System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Mission Control.

Keymaps

• Ctrl + Up Arrow: Select parent
• Ctrl + Down Arrow: Select Child
• Ctrl + Right Arrow: Select Next Child Sibling
• Ctrl + Left Arrow: Select Previous Child Sibling
• Ctrl + Shift + Arrow Key: Keep the current selection and add the parent or child.
• Ctrl + Alt + Left/Right Arrow: Select Opposite. When in mesh edit mode it cycles through the connected vertices.

Side Identifiers

The default side identifiers recognised are:

left/right, lft/rgt, lt/rt, lf/rg, l/r

Identifiers can be used as a prefix (i.e. left_), suffix (i.e. left) or embedded (i.e. left_).

Identifiers can also be written in just lowercase (i.e. left), only uppercase (i.e. LEFT) or capitalised (i.e. Left).

Identifier can either use underscore "_" or period "." separators.

Components

Pickwalking can be used in edit mode for mesh and curve objects to navigate between vertices and curve points.

Mesh

Mesh vertex navigation is based on the screen direction and therefore is influenced by the view direction. If a vertex cannnot be assigned to one of the four available directions it cannot be selected. This is the case when more than four vertices/edges are connected to one vertex.

To access all connected vertices of a vertex use Ctrl + Alt + Left/Right Arrow to cycle between these.

When pickwalking between vertices of a set of extruded edges you can use Ctrl + Up/Right to select the next vertex and Ctrl + Down/Left to select the previous vertex.

Curve

When pickwalking between points of a curve you can use Ctrl + Up/Right to select the next vertex and Ctrl + Down/Leftto select the previous vertex. When reaching the last/first point the selection wraps and the first/last point is selected respectively.