Selecting & editing
Blender's own click does not select anything iCity made. Selection runs through the addon's gizmos, armed by the Select tool in the rail, and only while the engine is running. This page covers what picks what, what a hold-drag moves, and where an element's controls live.
Blender’s click does not select your city
Every object the addon owns is marked unselectable in Blender. Click a road with Blender's own Select tool and the click passes straight through it: no outline, no active object, nothing in the N panel. Nothing is broken. Picking runs through the addon's own gizmos, which set the addon's selection channel directly — the channel the cards, the shortcuts and the engine all read.
Those gizmos are drawn only when three things are true at once: you are in the iCity 2 workspace, the header toggle is on DRAFT, and the engine is running. Your city lives in that engine process, not in your .blend, and with it stopped every gizmo and every tool in the rail is a handle onto nothing — see how iCity fits into Blender and the engine.
The 3D viewport in the iCity 2 workspace, header toggle on DRAFT, engine running, Roads mode (Alt+2) active and nothing selected, angled so the white node dots on the graph nodes and the road ribbons are both clearly visible. Blender's own Select tool must be the active tool in the toolbar.
One more thing has to be true, and it catches people who keep working the way they always have: Blender's own Select tool must be the active tool in Blender's toolbar. With Move, Rotate or Scale active, the road width handles, the node handles and the floors arrow are all hidden, and the status bar drops its drag hints with them.
In DESIGN the gizmos come back as pickers only — no editing handles. They appear on the Parameters and Materials tabs, so you can choose which element a card acts on, and only while the pointer is inside a 3D viewport.
Modes, and what a click picks in each
The mode decides what is pickable. Switch modes from the tabs down the left rail of the iCity Editor, or with Alt+1 through Alt+6. The status bar names the mode you are in together with its number, so the mapping teaches itself as you work: Roads (Alt 2), Regions (Alt 3), Lots (Alt 4), Massing (Alt 5).
The iCity Editor in Draft with the engine running, cropped to the left rail so the mode tabs Graph, Roads, Blocks, Lots and Massing are all readable with Roads the lit one. The same capture must include the Blender status bar along the bottom of the window, showing the Roads (Alt 2) caption.
The rail tab reads Blocks while the status bar caption for the same mode reads Regions. Several names disagree like this across the interface; the glossary lines them up.
Select is a tool
Select is the first entry in the rail's tool list in every mode, and it is the tool you start in. It carries no keys of its own — it is the state in which nothing else has claimed the click.
Clicking the lit Select button switches selection off. Clicks then do nothing, the box drag stops, A and Ctrl+I go quiet, and right-click gives Blender's context menu back. The unlit button is the only thing that says so, and clicking it again brings selection back. Arming a draw tool takes the click the same way; clicking that draw tool a second time returns you to Select.
The ⋮ at the right of the selection header carries the whole-selection verbs: Select all, Invert selection and Deselect all, the last two only when something is selected. Below them is a Hide gizmos in <Mode> checkbox, which switches that mode's gizmos off on their own and stays set until you clear it.
Every one of these keys falls through to Blender's own when nothing iCity applies — outside the city, A is still Blender's select all and Ctrl+Z is still Blender's undo. Ctrl+Z only reaches the city when the last thing you did was an iCity edit.
Press to select, hold to move
The handles do double duty. A press picks; holding the button and dragging the same handle edits, with the city rebuilding live under the drag. Release commits.
One road segment selected in Roads mode, seen from a high angle and zoomed close enough to read all of its handles at once — the move cross at the centre of the road, the dark blue width handles on the road bound, the teal width handles on the outer sidewalk bound, and the white node dot at each end of the segment.
Dragging the body of a shape does nothing. A region, lot or building body is a click-only pick — on a region or a lot the corner squares and the edge bars own all of the movement, and a building has no move handle at all, only the floors arrow. A road body is click-only too; its centre cross is what moves it. That is why the status bar offers Reshape on a shape and Move/Resize on a road.
Massing mode with a single procedural building selected and the floors arrow drawn above it, captured mid-drag with the mouse button held so the building shows its new height and the iCity Editor header shows the live floor count.
G grabs whatever the current move target is, and on a shape that means a corner has to be picked first — with only the body selected there is no target and the key falls through. X, Y and Z lock a running drag to an axis, and Esc restores the value the handle started from.
The element card, and the popup
In Draft the selected element's controls are drawn inline in the iCity Editor, under a selection header that names the active object and counts the rest — Building_7 · 5 Selected — with a delete button and the ⋮ flush right. The card appears in Roads, Blocks, Lots and Massing, and only while the picked element matches the mode you are in. In Blocks that element is a region: the mode is pinned to regions, so a block itself is never the card's subject.
The iCity Editor in Draft, Massing mode, with one building picked and four more shift-added, so the selection header reads the active building's name followed by 5 Selected, with the delete button and the vertical ellipsis flush right, and the building's Type buttons and Floors row drawn on the card below it.
Right-click the element in the viewport for the same controls as a floating popup. It follows the selection, so picking another element swaps its title and contents in place; drag it by its title bar, close it with the × or Esc. It does not open while a draw tool is armed, or while selection is switched off. In Design, re-clicking an already selected element opens it too.
The floating element popup open in the 3D viewport just after right-clicking a selected road in Roads mode, titled SEGMENT, showing the Subdivide, Straighten and Delete Segment buttons, with its draggable title bar and its close X both visible and the selected road behind it.
Where a building is not procedural the floors row is replaced by the line Floors: procedural buildings only, and the floors arrow is not drawn on it either. Straighten, Merge Lots and Subdivide report their refusals to the Info editor and the status bar rather than a popup, so check there when a button appears to do nothing.
The names shift between surfaces. The popup titles a road SEGMENT while the status bar calls the same thing a Road; a region's Type buttons read Buildings while the property behind them is named Massing. This page uses the word on screen; the glossary holds both.
Deleting is not a soft state. The confirmation says so — this is a persistent edit — a regenerate will not bring it back — and the element flashes red under the dialog while you decide.
UNSYNCED in the selection header
When the whole selection is locked, the selection header prints UNSYNCED after the object's name. It is a warning, not a label: that object is frozen out of procedural editing.
A locked building selected in Massing mode so the selection header prints UNSYNCED after the object name. The viewport must be in the same capture, showing that object in its darker role material with no floors arrow and no handles drawn on it, beside an unlocked neighbour in the normal material for comparison.
- —The engine skips it when it re-emits the city, so it keeps whatever geometry it has.
- —The selection gizmos ignore it, so floors, type and reshape do nothing on it — the handles are simply not drawn.
- —Its default role material swaps to a darker variant, and
hide_selectcomes off, so it becomes normally selectable and editable with Blender's own tools. It is the one iCity object Blender's click does reach.
No button in the editor sets that flag. The Lock button that used to sit on the element card was removed, and sending a theme no longer claims objects — the dress arrives as new objects in the iCity2 Front End collection and replaces nothing in place. So an UNSYNCED element normally comes from a file dressed by an earlier build, or from someone running the Lock / Unlock operator by hand.
No button clears it either. The operator that reverses it is named Sync — it unlocks the selection and regenerates so the procedural system reclaims the geometry, replacing any manual edits — but it went unwired when the lock button went, and nothing in the editor calls it. Both operators are still registered, so Blender's own operator search (F3) reaches them; that is the only route left. Graph mode's Regenerate is not one: it rebuilds the whole city from the base graph, and because re-emits skip locked objects it leaves an UNSYNCED one exactly as it is.
An UNSYNCED element is still yours to edit — with Blender's tools, on the mesh, by hand. What you cannot do is drive it from the engine again.
When nothing selects
Work down this list before concluding the addon is broken.
- —The engine is stopped. The rail carries no tools, the gizmos are gone and the status hints are inert. Press Start Engine — in Graph mode it sits along the bottom of the editor, in every other Draft mode in the middle of the panel, under the message.
- —You are not in the iCity 2 workspace. The gizmos exist only there.
- —The header toggle is on DESIGN. Design gives you picking only, on the Parameters and Materials tabs, and only with the pointer over a 3D viewport.
- —Select is switched off. Its rail button is unlit. Click it once.
- —A draw tool is armed. The click belongs to that tool. Press Esc or D, or click the lit tool again.
- —Blender's Move, Rotate or Scale tool is active. Pick Blender's Select tool and the edit handles come back.
- —You are in the wrong mode. A lot is not pickable in Massing. Use Alt+2 to Alt+5, and read the status bar caption to confirm where you are.
- —Gizmos are hidden for this mode. Check the Hide gizmos in <Mode> box in the selection header ⋮.
- —The element reads UNSYNCED. See above — no control in the editor will pick it up again.
You do not have to memorise the keys. The status bar prints the current mode's own vocabulary while nothing is happening, and swaps to a draw tool's whole set the moment you arm it — before you commit to a stroke. The names that disagree between one surface and another are lined up in the glossary.
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