Hello everybody.
This last week I was talking with an animator at my job and he told me that he toke some rigs that he never got in to a gimbal lock.
What do you guys do to prevent this issue? The only thing that I heard about to try to avoid Gimbal Lock is the rotation order of the joints and controls. Is there more issues that I can check or change to avoid this?
Thanks everybody.
Cya.
I would suggest having a parent or child gimbal control. In essence it’s just an extra control on top or below a control, so that the animators can avoid gimbal lock.
The bad side of this setup is that you can have too many controls in the rig which can make the rig look cluttered (that can be solved with a on/off switch for the gimbal controls) and the animators have an extra control per control, which can cause confusion and/or make it harder to go back and fix an animation scene.
having it above or below the control its up to you. Having it below is nice because if you move the control it will carry the child gimbal control.
Thanks Dimitri,
I´ll do a test, present this alternative to the animators and see what they think.
If I find any other way, I´ll post it here.
Cya.
What program? Maya? I was working with some animators that thought that as well, but they didn’t realize there were different display modes for the control so while they thought they were never getting gimbal lock, the gizmo was just on local display rather than gimbal display.
And same with Max actually,which is usually the case with Biped, which is true that they don’t get gimbal lock, but that’s because they’re using Quaternion rotations rather than Euler, which is why they have the nightmare of trying to solve graph curves for XYZ and W, the corrective curve.
Other than that, Iduno that you can set up one that doesn’t get it, just much less likely to get them, or has redundancies built in so that if a control hits it, there is a back up control that is still clean.
you can also read over this and pass it on to the animators as an alternative to the problem.
No matter how much you work to build a rig that won’t break, animation will break it with in seconds of opening it. Have them do it early and often , fix what you can and what you can’t give them some one button click fixes like this.
Brad
Hello Sean and Brad, thanks for the answer dudes.
All this conversation starts because we have an animator here, that works at Coyote Falls.
This guys told me that the rigs used in this movie never got gimbal.
Sean, I do have this problem here too, some animators insist in animate in local mode and then they complain about how the curves are working. :-S
Quaternion is not an option for a while… I already heard about codes to simplify the curves when using quaternion, but i believe that we don´t have it as a priority in this moment.
Brad, this link is a very nice to send to the animators.
I´m putting various opinions and links together to present to they and see if they believe that avoid completely the gimbal lock is impossible.
After the presentation, I´ll put the result here … lol
Thank you dudes.
Cya.
Ping Josh on the Rigging Dojo site, I can tell you that there isn’t a gimble free rig that uses eular curves,
A little before post here I sent an email inside the Dojo campus to Josh, I wanna show his answer to Ivan(the animator).
But I tottaly trust all the answers that I got here.
Probably we will try to use the two controllers and see what the animators think.
In Ivans case, its a little more dificult to explain and make him believe, because he came from 2D animation… But everything will fit in the end… lol.
A little before post here I sent an email inside the Dojo campus to Josh, I wanna show his answer to Ivan(the animator).
But I tottaly trust all the answers that I got here.
Probably we will try to use the two controllers and see what the animators think.
In Ivans case, its a little more dificult to explain and make him believe, because he came from 2D animation… But everything will fit in the end… lol.
I recently checked out a rig that had a custom solution to switch between Euler and Quaternion curve. I didn’t dig into it deeply, but I’m guessing the switch was done using some sort of layering system, so that you can specify a segment of time to convert to Quat and then revert back to Euler. I hadn’t seen that approach before.
Our own approach is to try to use optimal axis order to avoid encountering gimbal lock to begin with, and if necessary use Euler Filter in Max to help compensate for locking issues.
One fix that worked for me a lot in the past (in max) was to convert the controller for the gimbal-ing object to tcb rotation and then back to euler. Very dirty but often times saved my neck!
My fix for gimbal problems was to change the rotation order on the offending controller, sometimes keying back and forth between rotation orders in one animation. That can be annoying to coworkers though, as it’s not completely obvious when that fix is being used if they have to touch your anims. In the end, I just embraced gimbal lock as a reality, and keyed on every frame and/or adjusted rotation orders as necessary. Some people (myself…) get very hung up on gimbal problems, where other animators just deal with it.