UX Proposition to Improve the Transform Gizmo : To avoid visually overlapping axis, modify the widget to only shows the controls most relevant to your point of view.
The Struggle: I have spent the last year deep in Unreal and I was constantly fighting the transform widgets. Due to axes overlapping, it is sometime a struggle to select the right control, forcing to rotate the camera just to select the correct axis.
The Proposal: Smart Auto-hiding As a UX designer first and foremost, this friction really bothered me. I put together a mockup for a concept that could ease this. Instead of showing every control all the time, the widget would automatically hide the axis pointing toward the camera. This ensures only the two axes parallel to the screen are always the one accessible without interferences.
The Logic: If I am looking at an object from the front, I rarely want to push it away from me (depth). I want to move it Up/Down or Left/Right.
Override: To give user the full control, we need a shortcut to override this. Alt-Space is a perfect fit. Since Space already cycles through widgets, Alt-Space would simply cycle through the displayed planes.
Manual Mode: If a user prefers manual control, they can just use the shortcut. Alt-Space would cycle from the standard 3-axis view to the most logical plane, then through the others, and back to 3 axis.
Why this matters This is a small change, not really hard to code, a simple dot product will do the trick, but I am convinced that it would have a massive impact on the daily flow of every artist and animator.
I am tagging @endofthehall as it could be of interest for his work, and @Fredo.74 because I guess that it would also help animators a lot.
And I would love to hear what the community thinks.