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…
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