How can I select unconnected vertices, edges, or faces that are nearby my current selection? I have a mesh which is a clump of grass comprised of stems and blades sticking from the stems. The blades are touching or nearly touching some faces of the stems but are not connected to them. They are all in one mesh together. I want to select some of those stems and then select only the blades that are sticking from them. I can select some faces of some stems and then "select more" to increase the selection to include all of the faces of only the stems I have selected. Then I want to be able to select any vertices that are in close proximity, though unconnected, to my current selection of faces. This will allow me to get some verts of the blades and then "select more" to get the whole blades. The entire grass clump is quite dense so it would be time consuming to manually search through it to only select those things I want. So how can I tell Blender to select any items that are nearby (short distance) any items of my current selection though are not connected? Thanks!
In Edit Mode you can hold L down while hovering the mouse over what you want to select. Then the whole piece of connected geometry will get selected, and you only have to move the mouse around a bit to pick up other pieces of unconnected geometry. Depending on what your setup looks like, this might help.