I’m coming to Unreal from another engine and was plagued by this problem several times. While acknowledging the other causes and fixes here from experienced users, I also wanted to share my “newbie pilot error” that was the cause – and solution – for me, and may help other newcomers.
The symptom for me wasn’t the transform gizmo disappearing, but rather that it would work only on one axis and refuse to react to the other two axes.
Solution? I was in Brush Edit mode. Switching out of Brush Edit mode fixed the problem.
For the Unreal developers, I’d like to respectfully suggest that if the viewport is going to ignore an axis, when the user tries to drag on that axis there should be a momentary tooltip next to the axis (and cursor) that explains why the axis is currently disabled. (For example, “Cannot move this axis in Brush Edit mode”).
I hope this helps someone else. I love Unreal so far, but this had me scratching my head for quite a while before the “Doh!” moment when I realized my mistake.
I just encountered this problem. 4.26.2 here. I had just imported an obj from an online site and this problem seemed to happen. For awhile I could not even select the toggle in the quick settings, but it finally got selected somehow, but the problem remains, no transport gizmo, scale tool etc. I have went about an hour or so looking for an answer…
Seems to have started working again, not sure what I did, closed all viewports and reopened several times, closed and reopened the program several times.
UE 5.0.3, imported a bunch of assets from marketplace and I lost my transform widget as well.
Tried all the above suggestions:
reset “Show”, reset Editor > Viewport options.
turned game mode on off, turned cinematic / default on off.
switched to 4 panels, set top mode to perspective and re-expanded.
couldn’t see a “show widget” option in my top right quick settings, but could see an un-set hot key option for the same name, so set hot key for “show widget” to alt shift right bracket after noticing alt right and left brackets make widget bigger/smaller (also tried making it bigger). Hot key’ing didn’t solve.
swapped to landscape / mesh paint mode then back to select mode.
Got it back after restarting ue5 using the epic launcher > library instead of double clicking the project, it was still gone, but under the top right gear quick Settings, i finally saw and checked back on “Show Widget Transform” (which also showed the shortcut which I had set and had tried multiple times to no avail earlier) and it magically came back.
So my solution to add to this massive list, if nothing above worked, is restart your project, using the launcher, and toggle Settings > Show Widget Transform. There’s a chance that menu option is getting disabled/hidden sometimes.
Thank you, @unit23! Toggling between Cinematic Viewport and Default Viewport worked for me. To summarize the three things that have worked for me in the past:
Change mode in the top left drop-down menu to Selection Mode
Click Settings gear button in top right of screen and ensure ‘Show Transform Widget’ is checked
Toggle between Cinematic Viewport and Default Viewport
