Hello, everyone.
I’m coming to you because I haven’t found any shortcuts, add-on or script allowing me to simply Move, Rotate or Scale, in all axis or specific axis without using the mouse.
I know there is shortcut W, E and R to change gizmo. I also know there is shortcut ALT or SHIFT or CTRL or a combination of them, with Left or Right click, or a combination of them, to move x, y or z axis, but all the current way of doing things seems terrible in terms of UX in my opinion.
I bought some courses from level designer, they still use the arrow gizmo to move things in screen space viewport. The way of moving things in the viewport is really long and quite old. We are in 2022, and using the mouse (having to select the small portion of the screen corresponding to the arrow (that is often hidden by other’s axis arrow) and being allowed to move only in the screen space (if you are near horizon, your mouse will reach infinite horizon really fast, but if you want to move down the objects, you need to be aligned to the location you want to reach)
After being used to blender ways of moving /rotating/scaling objects, it is really hard to go back to the old way of doing if by gizmo. And seeing senior level designer loosing their time all day make me feel pain for them.
If you never used blender shortcut, basically, you just press one key (G for grab, R for rotate, S for scale) and you enter a modal mode (Until you press escape or right click to abandon, or Left click to apply) In this modal you can move your mouse and the object will directly : move in screen space, rotate in screen tangent, or scale in all axis.
If you press the key X, Y or Z, the move will be locked to a specific axis, the rotation too, and the scale too, and it won’t be uniform.
If you press ALT + X, Y, or Z, allow you to move or scale in all axis but the one you pressed.
If you type a number while in modal, the object will move in the number in meters, if rotation, in degree or if scaled, it will be the multiplier number.
If you want to move the object in x-axis with 10 unit, and scale it by two, rotate it by 90°, you just have to press : G X 10 ENTER S 2 ENTER R Z 90 ENTER. Even if you don’t see what is there 10 units away.
Doing it by hands would need many more instructions, if adding value directly to the transformation matrix, you would still have to select each text, make addition or multiplication, and it doesn’t give instant feedback compared to the modal (you can change axis as you want in modals, if you forgot what axis you wanted to move).
The modal for the rotation is also more precise, as the rotation is done from the center of the object, the further your mouse is from this point, the more pixels you have to move your mouse to change one degree.
