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What does the rotation order attribute do specifically for animation?

Hey I’m still learning and constructing my own rig and components using mGear but i am very curious as to what this attribute does during animation. is it to adjust the rotation order just in general or key it during animation, if that’s even possible?

Apologies in advance if this is a stupid question.

it is unrelated problem to mgear, but this is an attempt to solve a problem named gimbal lock, i suggest you to look into this problem, it’s a mathematical problem related to inside of 3d softwares and how they are calculating rotations and animations related to rotations.

I know what gimbal lock is I was just wondering if it was keyable and can be changed mid animation.

yes you can, you can literally animate anything in maya, but it is a sudden key frame and maya doesn’t show the key frame on timeline for some reason, but for example you made 2 key frames one at frame 1 for xyz order then another key frame at frame 53 for yzx order, it not going to change gradually because it is an order what do you expect? but until frame 53 it uses xyz order and after that is yzx.
i never have animated something in this way and with gimbal lock problem on the way you should be careful about any inconsistency that it can bring to animation.

but capability yes, you can even animate file addresses.
and it supposed to be an order in general, it is just merely a maya feature that you can literally animate everything but this does not mean that some features are supposed to be animated

That’s very convenient, I run into annoying gimbal issues all the time.

Correct rotation order are very important in animation for ease of use and to allow the animators to clean up motion in the graph editor.

A quick example is the head rotation order. Ususally we want the twist rotation Y, to be the main axis of rotation and the forward rotation to be the next one.

The reason being that most of head rotation is in Y and we tend to layer the other rotation on top of that. Using a different rotation order would inevitably create a gimbal lock and we would lose one axis of rotation.

Usually I set my head rotation to zxy.