How to avoid gimbal lock with Character Studio?

[RockemSockem]

Quaternion math is such that it cannot be graphed, so you don't get access to the nice graph editor and the individual curves, so why use Quaternion? So you don't get gimbal lock.

Euler math allows you to access those curves individually in a graph editor, but you have to be careful because gimbal lock is always possible.

I haven't used Character Studio for almost 8 years, but if it's at all like Maya you should be able to change the rotation order of the joints. You may find a different rotation order more suitable to your animation habits. So try out some different rotation orders and see if you like them. XYZ will solve for the X rotation first, then Y, and then Z. Make sense?

[avdoot]

character studio can store different curves for different body groups, like for spine you can use quaternion and for arms you can use eular curves, it depends what you want.
and if you want to use eular curves for the biped rotation(bip or COM) you can change the axis order as well like if want to rotate the 'z' axis just change the order so that 'z' comes first and then it will calculate 'z' rotation first and you will not get any gimble locking problems.

[Guibou]

Thanks guys for your response. I wanted to use Euler mostly for all my arms animations, so i can have nice fluid arcs. So far, when i switch to Euler, i get weird inbetweens, small jerks. After reading your posts, i suppose i could set my arms bones with Euler and change the axis order to ZXY. If you guys think there's a better way to go about it, please let me know. Thanks for the help :)

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