Q:

Trouble selecting correct object in viewport

After switching from Maya to Blender I noticed that I can't select meshes as precisely as in Maya.
In Maya you select exactly what you clicked on, it doesn't matter how far the object is from the camera, you always get what you clicked on. In Blender it's fairly hard to select a specific mesh among other meshes, it seems Blender is trying to "help" me and correct my selection (like auto-aim in FPS games on console). I spend too much time trying to select the right mesh. Its not only time consuming, but also very annoying. I have to switch between shaded and wireframe modes, sometimes use strong zoom and hide functions to select the right mesh.
Is there a way to switch this "auto-aim" selection off? I would like to be able to select meshes just like in any other 3D program, by clicking exactly on them.

A:

You can also try changing the selection mode under User Preferences.  There are two options available now for selection.  

OpenGL Select
OpenGL Occlusion Queries

OpenGL Occlusion Queries is the newer, and faster method which seems to work better on AMD Radeon GPUS.

You can also use shift+b to draw-out a rectangular selection that will cause the view to zoom in on the selected location.   Picking objects tends to work better when you are zoomed in closer.  
shift+c will zoom out out to fit the scene.  Using these two shortcuts, you can quickly navigate to whatever object you would like to select and work on.

