I failed to resist spending more time on thinking about Gumball than I should. Looking at the V5 Gumball I see the following isssues:
- It does not offer all basic transform types, some are well hidden. Scale3D can only get accessed via Hotkey, Scale2D is unavailable, 2DMove doesn’t allow for numerical entry.
- The Widget doesn’t give feedback. This part just got greatly improved through mouseover highlighting
- The placement of rotate handles makes the widget larger than necessary.
- The underlying logic used is inconsistent - while Scale handles react dynamically to the object size all remaining handles have a predefined location/size. This got addressed in the latest build.
- The settings ball gets accessed with LMB. This is a needless trap in an area full of often accessed handles which use LMB. It’s the only handle offered which differs semantically, it opens a context menu and therefore should get accessed with RMB. Quite in general one should make all context menu functionality accessible by pressing single hotkeys too, that way one could for instance quickly cycle through different orientations of the widget.
Here’s a mockup for a possible Gumball redesign, it’s nothing really new and certainly isn’t visually refined yet. It rather picks up established conventions found in various other programs and combines them into a hopefully half way slim universal manipulator. While it looks considerably different, everything should work as usual and on click onto a handle a numerical input field appeared.
Appearance with a rotate handle clicked, irrelevant stuff gets culled. One might offer another circle for rotation in screen space but stricty speaking one then needed the same for Move and Scale too…
An alternative angle.
As stated before I would suggest to limit Gumballs handle types to just basic transforms. Should one e.g. at some point decide to offer Subdivision Surfaces, limiting Gumballs Extra-Features to Extrude appeared as a random choice. One needed another handle for Bevel, yet another for Bridge. I think one should deal with this topic differently.