Been away from Messiah for awhile and thought Id check back in with the new release. I dont remember having this problem before but Im getting wierd rotational interpalation between keys. Looks like gimbal problems. When in parent mode its better but say you have a null as a wrist control and have it in position where it is gimbals you can switch to screen or what ever to get te ability to rotate where you want back but you then have bad interpalation ie… like you just want the wrist to rotate in bank like in a waving motion but instead of having nice side to side motion you have the wrist tilting back in the pitch a bit in the middle of the keys. IMHO unless we have the ability to change rotational order, a euler filter or it goes back to the way it was I could by no means use this version to animate with. Im not using more than one controller for wrists. :hmm:
Gimbal issues
this issue always existed and hasnt stopped anyone from animating.
try using a different rotational system or do some creative parenting.
All animations done in Messiah are done by getting around this limitation. I do wish it wasn’t there but it isn’t THAT hard to work around.
http://www.projectmessiah.com/
Try the projectmessiah home page in the gallery-video section. Lots of great examples.
One solution is to make a new Null and use it for one Axis rotation only, for example :
UpperArm------LowerArm-------BANK_WristNull (Bank Axis only)-------Hand (use only Heading and Pitch Axis on this one)
Even with the ability to change Rotation Orders u will get Gimbal at one time, of course it minimizes it, but doesnt eliminate it, thinking ahead of this problems helps also, whenever u know u will get Gimbal or there is a strong chance of that happening, break the Rotation Axis …instead of one item doing all 3, make it two items.
Sure its annoying to have another CTRL to animate, but it´s a lot better than fighting Gimbals 
are you implying that im lying?
if you look around you will see that not only did i do full character rigs and animations, but made my project file available for download.
There’s not a single 3d program free from the problem of gimbal lock. Any software lets you use parent/world/local coordinates systems while keyframing and posing, but the interpolation is always made using parent coordinates. You have to make good parenting to build a good and “controlled” rotation system. Try yourself…in XSI, Lightwave…do some keyframing on a simple null using the local coordinates system, and play the animation. You’ll see how the software interpolates the key frames. Surely not using local rotation.
Lino Grandi: I found Animation Master to be relatively free of all Gimbol. And from what I was able to gather, Motion Builder uses the same “Euler to control but Quaternion under the hood” technique.
There are better implmentations and Messiah has made the first step already. It just needs to clean it up and make it more usable.
Animation master uses true quaternion, that is, you have 4 channels to mess with instead of 3. the fourth, W, is the cosine/sine of heading and bank…or something like that.
so… if you need to spin something on y axis, you can’t just type in 360 degrees in y to watch it spin. you have to key out 2 sine waves, one on the y axis, and the other on w.
what if you have to turn a character around?
so much for simple.
…and if you export any motion, such as BVH, w channel is ignored, and your motion is jacked up. luckily, A:M can bake back to Euler channels, as many game formats do not have quaternion motion curves. it takes up too much ram.
95% of all animation can be done in euler without a problem. where you will experience gimbals are where objects rotate past 90 degrees on pitch AND bank. this happens on 4 key items on your character: IK hands and IK shoulders. shoulders can be solved by banking the Clavicle 90 in setup, giving the shoulder’s greater range to heading. IK hands can be set to Quaternion interpolation.
even Softimage does it this way. Both xsi and messiah will store your keyframes as Euler, so you only have to worry about 3 axis’. wherein the space between your keys will get the quaternion-calculated curve… and you didn’t have to do anything for it. the “under the hood” approach.
I would say that messiah’s implementation is just fine and it’s just a pulldown menu away in the object’s spline block.
hope this helps you out.
JoeC
With one difference: get a null in XSI and rotate it, on any axis, as far as you want, in local coordinates: the values react as expected. Get a Null in messiah, or LW, rotate it on pitch in local coordinates, and past 90 degrees the pitch value goes backwards as you rotate further, and heading and bank get offset by 180°. This behaviour doesn’t exist in Maya neither, and it’s the one little differences that’s driving me nuts in messiah, since it also affects expressions that read an elements pitch value. Of course there are workarounds, such as the AngleBetweenTri function, but if it works in XSI or Maya, there must be a way for this to work in messiah too. I mentioned this so many times, and at the time Lyle said that they were planning a complete transformation system overhaul, which should also take care of this behaviour. I’d be curious to know what the state on this is now… This is one of the most important issues in the animate area IMO… :shrug:
yeah, that’s annoying. it comes from messiah’s implementation of their local mode rotation, where it behaves as if it were constrained for that. nearly all constraints(maya, A:Mgaspetc.) have troubles going over the -90,90 degree pitch issue.
pretend that the program is trying to keep the y axis aimed up all the time, and it will make more sense as to why Messiah does this. I dont use local mode except for static bones or translation.
all of this would make more sense if we had a rotate manipulator like Lightwave, that shows each axis in their real orientation.
but if it’s a keyframed object, and you have to use local mode, turn on Quaternion angles, that’s what it’s there for.
-JoeC
Thanks Joe and all of you for your input but Maks actually said it better in more tech terms what Im talking about. Thanks Maks and Im glad Im not the only one that feels its VERY important issue. When I use Maya and XSI gimbal is an issue but what Maks describes isnt. Gimbal is the only way I could think of putting it.
Newtek recently fixed this problem in LW. Add a the QuaternionBooster motion modifier to your object. Now when you rotate it in parent, world, or local cords it will interpolate perfectly between your keyframes.
For example, make a Null. Rotate it 90 degrees on pitch. Now two axis are aligned, bank and heading.
Set the cord system to local. Now you have access to the local heading axis. Grab the heading handle, Rotate the object 90 degrees on it.
Play back your motion. A very funky interpolation happens. Now add the QuaternionBooster
motion modifier. Play back your animimation. As you can see it rotates how you would expect 
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