I just tried the new TRS Gizmos in UE 5.4 and I struggle to understand how they can be so bad.
I was happy to finally see modern gizmos in UE which don’t require user to constantly click with their mouse cursor exactly on top of the gizmo handles to perform a transform operation, but this isn’t it.
For some inexplicable reason, I kid you not, the new gizmos have SELECTABLE handles! It means that once any gizmo handle is used, it becomes selected, so the Middle Mouse Button, which would, in any common sense software, always do the screen space transform in move mode, uniform scale in scale mode and trackball rotation in rotate mode will instead just transform the last selected axis of the gizmo. That. Is. Insane.
It means the point of MMB transform is defeated, as I always have to travel my mouse cursor to the gizmo to activate the axis I am about to transform. And if I am already there with my cursor, why on earth would I click it to make it active/selected, then move cursor off of it and use MMB to transform it when I can just directly LMB click-drag it?
Also, why don’t the Move and Scale gizmos always swap axes towards the view like in any other modern 3D software? It’s been the standard for over a decade.
What’s confusing here is not really how is it possible that the gizmo design is so bad, but how someone hired by a triple A game engine corporation got paid to work on new gizmos completely in isolation from any end user feedback, with clearly no prior experience with 3D software UX standards, and how did this even pass QA to be bundled as a plugin with official engine release. Epic always had somewhat reasonable quality standards when including something with the engine, even for experimental features. So I just don’t understand this…
So you just haven’t read the post? Let me make TL;DR just for you:
There’s no point of having a transform option which doesn’t require user to have mouse cursor on top of a gizmo handle to use if it requires the user to move the mouse cursor over the gizmo handle to activate it first.
There’s no point in using a software with late 90’s design of transform gizmos, which was then acquired by a corporation known for minimizing development expenses and maximizing pricing, as a direct reference of what a modern 3D object transformation scheme in a state of art software should look in a third decade of 21st century.
Bottom line is that current UE5 gizmos are pretty bad, so there was a light of a hope when I saw new gizmos are being worked on. You can imagine my surprise when I found out the new ones are somehow even worse than the current ones. A feat I previously thought was impossible.
wow the op is so disrespectful maybe that’s why no one wants to help…
but in case anyone else needs a little tip, you use ctrl + a specific mouse button to quickly switch axes. (by default, ctrl+LMB for x, ctrl + MMB for y, ctrl+RMB for z)
also, to let the MMB do its thing, you push the w/e/r button a second time to de-activate any axis (like press w again in translate mode)
I see your points, and they make good sense. Hopefully we can get this info back to the devs cause it’s pretty common sense, basic UI stuff. I can’t see any drawback to doing it correctly and since it’s still in Beta this might be the only chance to get it right before it gets forgotten about for another decade.
The axis facing away from the user is such a middle finger. Like how you going to pretend that’s not an issue.
The middle-mouse button thing might be debatable but I’d have to agree that the common operation is uniform scale, arcball and pan translate.
Side note, the ctrl+mouse button has been a heavy asset in my day to day.
I still don’t get it, you can MMB drag anywhere in the viewport to use active gizmo, but only its latest selected axis. It just doesn’t make sense, it loses the point. Usually, if you have move gizmo for example, you’d usually use this kind of mode to translate always in 2D screen plane, and you then use your 3D view orientation to define the plane of translation. It’s very comfortable way of transforming and animating. But with these ones, you have to first activate the handle. If you are literally there with your mouse cursor on top of the handle, then you may as well just click-drag it.
Pressing the shortcut for the mode again will unlock the selected axis. E,g, if you are in translation and have the X axis active by pressing W it will go back to moving in screen space.
For rotate pressing E will reset the axis. Then pressing E will swap between screen rotation or “free form” rotation.
