I suggest to put this option under the menu button on the right rather than having it always visible.

Alternative for placing the autoselect option:

What about doing it like this:

I worry a bit this is being added because the select option is limited,
Currently if you want to exclusively select a vertex group you have to...

• (de)select all in the 3d view.
• select the vertex group.
• press the select key.

Having this autoselect option brings it down to one step... but then you have extra setting to worry about.

What about some way to select the vertex group directly, without adding an option?.

Maybe there could be a right click menu on the veretx group (select/deselect/hide/reveal... etc)... or some icon in the list to click on to select (though I rather not do that).

If this is added...

This same functionality could apply to other areas...

• bone groups
• materials in editmode.
• object groups (some way to click on on a group in the object buttons and change the selction - though we do have this in the outliner)

Even if these are not added immediately - think its worth to consider if we would accept adding these - so the feature can be done in a generic way (maybe add some auto-select icon to replace the AUTO).

@Brecht Van Lommel (brecht), having in a menu could be annoying if you open up someone elses blend file and change vgroups and happen not to know of this option.

however I rather not add too much clutter to UI either...

Think this should be postponed for 2.70,

What's the motivation behind this functionality? For visual inspection, doesn't weight paint mode fit the bill? There you can also see weights...

@bassam kurdali (bassamk) - yep, I can image some cases you might want to have this - but for the purpose of discussion would be good to list exactly how this helps.

also, you can see wights in editmode now, added 2.69 (draw option).

Here is an example where visual inspection just using the colors doesn't work well:

So just before i took this screen shot:

• I was inspecting the weights of the RIGHT_HANDLE and i have selected only that group's verts.
• Then i selected the LEFT_HANDLE vgroup in the Vertex Groups list.

So by now we see that no apparent problem exists. however i really want to know which verts are assigned to the vgroup. So what i do next is:

• i deselect all verts
• i select the verts of the LEFT_HANDLE bone (from the vertex Group)

And i get a surprise:

I know, in weight paint mode we can enable the colorisation of unweighted verts in black. That helps a bit to discover the problematic vgroup in this case.

However.. If you break down the movements that are needed to see (and select) the verts of another weight group, then you end up with:

• move 3D cursor to 3D view
• hit "a"
• move cursor to new vgroup in list
• select new vgroup
• move cursor down to the Select button
• click the select button.

Here is a visualisation of the mouse movements and clicks:

If we had "autoselect" enabled here, we just can click through the vgroups in the list, we could even use the cursor up/down keys from the keyboard to quickly scroll through the list.

@Gaia Clary (gaiaclary) thanks for the explanation,

IMHO the issue is really a problem with limited display/feedback.

Coloring the mesh to show zero weights is good when painting since you can identify zero weights as you paint ... BUT,
not so good for debugging weight paint problems since you have to rotate the model about to inspect it each time you switch weight groups.

Auto-select seems to me to be a workaround so that you very quickly can see which verts use which group when changing (not necessarily bad...), but this makes me think we could do better with mesh display.

For example, when weight-paint colors are enabled with vertex selection (both editmode and weight paint mode), vertices in the group could be displayed a different color, even in wireframe mode, which has a similar advantage to autoselect - that you can quickly step over vgroups and immediately see which vertices use that group.

ops, i totally forgot about that feature request.
I believe though the feature is still something handy to have.
I like campbell's idea to just colorize the vertices for the current selected vertex group.
Maybe also add a color preference for that with default vertex color pink?

@Gaia Clary (gaiaclary) could you make a new design task for this? (link to this one and close it would be best)

Poke for status update.