[TRACKER] VFX workflow issues

[QbieShay]

Describe the project you are working on

Various VFX.

Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project

This is the output of a focus session with a professional VFX artist that offered their time to give feedback.

• Number fields on VS are frustrating to work with. The UX would benefit immensely from using the same widgets as the inspector: drag to change value, single cilck focuses the whole number field, etc.
• GPUParticles should be auto-assigned a process material and an appropriate mesh+material when created ( https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/5046, https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/5045)
• Gizmo covers the particles: this is an issue due to the fact that some changes in the inspector/editor makes it so that in order to change the properties of a material, the node with the material needs to be focused. It's unclear to me when this happened (sometimes between 3.4 and 3.4.4 i believe) but it worsened significantly the experience when making and tweaking materials. Since Godot4 has per-instance materials, we should find a good way to ensure the gizmo can be hidden. Proposal is to add a 5th option to the gizmo which hides the gizmo entirely (all - translation - rotation - scale - none)
• Unock shader editor in a separate window
• Add emission transform built-in. It's commonly used in VFX.
• Add tags for Visual shader nodes in the search (so that nodes can be tagged with their common counterpart in other engines)
• Move billboard properties into a shader render mode. Using Billboard node transform is extremely counter intuitive, especially for people that come from other engines, which allow to do it way more easily
• Overlay node for scalar - Connecting vectors into floats should take the r/x component of the vector rather than the average (which has almost no common usecase). Add average as a node if necessary. fixed - Open shader files persist between sessions done

[mubinulhaque]

How many of these has been fixed by 4.2?