Scaling multiple actors Efficiently

[Anti-Wisdom]

[ CURRENT SITUATION ]

Currently, scaling multiple objects will scale each object according to its own personal Axis.
This can have its uses but overall it is much more common to require scaling by one singular actor’s axis, especially when some of the objects have been rotated.

Even if objects are all attached to the same actor, and this actor is scaled, the objects will still be scaled in different directions, limiting the power of the Scale tool considerably.

UE5 [Feature Request] Selected object Space Scaling

Handy illustration from OhiraKyou

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[ THE FEATURE ]

I’m proposing a toggle to switch between ‘First selected actor Space’ and ‘Individual Origin Space’.

To be more specific, a way to toggle between:
[Mode 1] Scaling all selected actors in the direction of the first actor that was selected, (skewing rotated actors and child actors of these)
[Mode 2] Scaling all selected actors by their own origins. The way that is currently implemented to retain the uses it currently has.

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[ WHY? ]

• Quickly scaling a set of objects
  The simplest reason is something we’ve all had to do at one point or another.
  Quickly selecting and scaling a big complicated object with several child actors,
  or scaling several separate actors in the same direction, even though they have different orientations.

• Skewing can be useful!
  It was noted in several related posts that this feature was not supported to prevent ‘Skewing’ of objects, though this seems like a very useful effect for scaling an infinite variety of complex objects. (For example, scaling rocks or organic objects in all possible directions)

• Most Engines support this
  Not so much a reason for why, as a reason for ‘why not?’.
  A great variety of engines, both Game engines and Model engines support this feature and several do allow the user to toggle between world space, local space, or ‘Active Object’ space.

• Efficiency
  A toggle that a level designer can simply use a shortcut for makes the process of scaling many actors uniformly much faster and easier to work with. Even when attaching all objects to 1 actor did work, it still cost a lot of time, making this an arduous step in building our games.

Example of toggle option in Blender:

Unreal [Feature Request]

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[ RELATED POSTS ]

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It was noted in one of these posts that a Feature Requests had already been made. Sadly this request is now inaccessible or deleted. The link no longer exists.
Since I have found no other feature request on the current forum of this matter I hoped to revive the matter.

Is this somehow already a feature and have these posts and myself simply not discovered this? Please let me know!

[Kavan]

I’ve upvoted this.
I’m creating a UI, want a 3d mesh child to be rotating, scale the parent x axis to flatten the spinning mesh into a 2d image of a spinning mesh. Can’t seem to do it with the current limitations of scale, was surprised since this seems like functionality in many other 3d modeling platforms.

[Anonymous_aeda875550975e6a352c9edc37e6eee3 (Vector)]

I’ve upvoted this too.

I first experienced this issue in UE5.

It is happening for each emitter in the Niagara system, and I did not have this issue in UE4, so the same work is showing different results.

It doesn’t make sense and feels like a bug to change a common rule in a 3D program just because of a different version.

It’s terrible to have to fix all of your years of work because of a bug like this, so makes me question whether UE5 is a reliable engine.

I hope this issue is resolved.

[Dannan]

I have a Work around for this atm If you are interested ,

first select all meshes you want to scale then use the modeling mode > Xform > Merge once merged you can Scale in same direction no matter what the roations were previously, another quick tip to use in conjunction is Alt + MMb Drag on the Pivot to temporarily move it to a location you want to scale from.