@smcclelland 's team is working on improving the editor UI in big stride and he suggested a thread on the scene view, sort of a wish list and discussion of the improvement we’d all like to see.
I’ll start by saying the scene view is near perfect and whenever I use Maya or XSI I wish for things like WASD, RMB look around but a few things are oddly missing so here is a short list:
fix frame around non mesh. Currently if you frame a light it will dolly way back, usually too far back. I suggest that framing a non-mesh only tracks the camera to center it, no dolly since we don’t know its size and any default is wrong as the system doesn’t know what scale we work at.
changeable speed of frame selected animation. Frame selected animation has its use like when you work on a very repetitive scene, it’s just 2-3x too slow. If a speed field is too much work, a toggle will do.
z-depth for all transform manipulators like is the case for all other gizmos. It will allow to see where the pivot is within the object, and also where the object is within the scene by showing intersection with the manipulator’s axis.
shift+space should be responsive no matter the focus, currently, on PC one has to either click in the window to get maximize working, during play it’s the oposite, you need to click outside the window you want to maximize then move the cursor back in this window then press shift+space. I think on mac it works as it should.
some way to select and transform objects in the game view. This’ll allow to compose a shot. I suggest an extra menu item at the top of the gizmo button.
make frame-follow optional or change the way it’s triggered. It’s currently very distracting and switches on in a way that’s hard to control. This is due to framing animation being too slow, giving the impression that frame is unresponsive so I tend to double tap ‘f’. I suggest replacing a time-bound switch with a modifier such as shift+f. In general I found that double click on keyboard != double click on mouse, I don’t know why, maybe due to the baseline frequency of typing a key vs clicking on an object: for those used to typing at high cpm time-bound keyboard triggers are not fun.
Is the problem here mostly objects that don’t have proper bounding boxes? i.e. framing on an empty GameObject and flying off to random spots in 3D space?
Good feedback. Will add it to the UI animation feedback!
Is the problem here being able to visualise the pivot of the object or more about being able to visualise transforms within view?
Huh. Sounds like a bug but UI focus on Windows is a pretty annoying thing to deal with in general. Will look into this.
Is the intention here to be able to make tweaks within a cinematic context or just spot something in the game you want to fix and do so without having to exit the runtime?
It appears this is also assigned to Shift-F (so many duplicate hotkeys!) but there’s no affordance to tell you this is enabled which is a bit troubling. Also doesn’t appear to be a toggle state, user has to kill it by pressing F to frame. Added to the list!
Now for some other fun questions I had:
A discussion arose recently about having a generic selection tool so users could select objects without having to be in the Move, Rotate, or Scale tools. Thoughts?
Aside from bugs are there other problems or things you feel if we tackled in the Scene view we’d make artists lives 1000x better?
What about gizmos? What are the problems users have with gizmos?
Personally, I’d love some keyboard buttons to do things when moving objects with the Transform tool. For example, it’s sometimes hard to line up objects exactly how I want to. It would be nice if there was a “low-sensitivity-move” key combination (where it would take a lot of mouse movement to move very little), and a “high-sensitivity-move” key combination (where it would take little mouse movement to move an object a lot). For instance, R+Mouse to move little, and F+Mouse to move a lot.
I’d also like to have the same for mouse-wheel zoom, as sometimes the mouse wheel will zoom too much or too little, forcing me to double-click on an object to get the zoom to go more-or-less. It’s very minor, but would be nice to have.
When using the Rotate tool, it would be fantastic to have W and S change Y rotation, A and D change X rotation and Q and E to change Z rotation. Instead, we need to use the mouse-slider in the Inspector, which isn’t as convenient.
That’s genius. I think a toggle in the Gizmos menu named “Allow selection of objects in Game view” would be awesome! Perhaps it could be implemented where you can use the select/rotate/scale tools on an object in game view by holding CTRL (but make that button customizable as CTRL might be used in-game!).
Finally, I’d love to have a feature to save changes made while playing. Perhaps holding Shift while pressing “play” to get out of play mode would work. Sometimes I have a script that I’m tweaking the values of while playing, I get a perfect combination, then I use the SNIPPING TOOL to save the numbers I changed, then I go out of play view and ALT-TAB my way between the 2 programs to copy the numbers. That’s even more painful if I’ve moved and rotated objects in play mode.
In short, a lot of real-time changes can be made in play mode, so an option to save those changes would be awesome!
A bit of both and knowing where the object is in relationship to other objects via the transform handles ghosting when behind geometry. TDI showed lines extending along the translate axis while fading away, this gave great spacial information.
Tweaks within a cinematic context yes. The debug idea you’re outlining would be very useful. I can see playing a tunrime in auto profiler, noticing that on dx9 pc certain objects are purple (lost their shaders) clicking on it in the runtime and having the editor ping that object,
It used to be like that before ‘q’ got assigned to the hand icon which track camera. ‘q’ in maya is selection so for a maya artist it would be nice to have.
1000x is a tall order and the scene view is nicely minimalist so I’m drawing a blank. Maybe a few small things would add up to x1000, like
add a search field in the gizmos popup
Reference lines would be great too for those of us who suffer from reference spaghetti syndrome. Maybe more of an inspector feature though.
It’d be great if the gizmos lit up when the mouse is above. It gives a very satisfying sense of responsiveness like in XSI
Contextual hot box like in maya would help keep us in the view + muscle memory FTW!
Some gizmos have inconsistent functionalities, for example the colliders don’t have a center handle.
Rotation gizmo lines are too narrow and as a result I end up rotating the view axis.
You then end up losing 1:1 lock between mouse movement and object. Unless it modifies the mouse speed itself which then solves scrollwheel zoom.