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I think I'm running into a gimbal lock issue — the animation behaves unpredictably, swerving between perpendicular angles and I need to rely on custom transforms to animate my rig. I switched to quaternion rotation, which solved the problem, but now I'm wondering if this is the proper approach for rigging.

I'm used to animating in clean, orthogonal steps — like 0°, 90°, 180°, 270° — along a single axis. But in this setup, the motion happens at weird 60° angles around a central point, and doesn't align neatly with the standard XYZ axes.

Because of this, I feel "stuck" having to rely on custom transforms and orientations, which can be tedious.

Is there a better or more efficient way to rig and animate in cases like this? How to rig and animate rotation at non-orthogonal angles efficiently?

Using Euler Angles

Using Quaternions works like a charm but I'm not sure if it is standard practice to deal with custom transforms in this type of rigging process. Can I make my life easier with this type of rig?

Using Quaternions

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  • $\begingroup$ Can you provide more information on the movable pieces of your model and their expected movement? In general, one would orient their bones to require animating as few channels (X Translation being an example of a channel) as possible. To avoid Gimbal lock, try to change the Rotation Mode. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 27 at 17:23
  • $\begingroup$ @MrA Yes I changed rotation mode to Quaternions which works nicely and avoided the Gimbal lock. I added my setup blend file under 1MB size. Does that help? I'm just curious how expert riggers would do this. Is it even possible to avoid duplication of essentially the same bones and animation 6 times because what if I had to do this 30 times or more? $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 28 at 0:08
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    $\begingroup$ I meant to change it to one of the other Euler types. The file helped a lot. The Bone Roll is what you needed to improve. I will write an answer now. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 28 at 12:09
  • $\begingroup$ It won't be possible to avoid the duplication of these bones, since each represents a rotation pivot. However, it is possible to animate one bone and copy its animation with constraints or use it to drive the other bones. Adding a control rig over the deform rig you're currently building can be the topic of a new question. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 28 at 12:44

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The screenshot below shows the original orientation of the six bones in question.

Old Orientation

The desired motion of these bones is shown in the GIF below.

Desired Motion

The motion can be achieve with a rotation about the local z-axis of the right and left bones, but the other bones will need a more complex rotation. Using Euler is straightforward if a rotation around one axis is needed. Therefore, I suggest to change the bone orientations to match the following screenshot.

New Orientation

Note how the desired motion can be obtained by a rotation around the local z-axis of each of the bones. Also, note how the x-axis is pointing out for each of the bones. This means that the rotation will be a positive, z-axis rotation for all bones. This should simplify animating greatly as all the bones can be rotated together (when the Transform Pivot Point is set to Individual Origins).

To edit the orientation of the bones, in edit mode, with a bone selected, run Armature > Bone Roll > Set Roll and move the mouse. Alternatively, Roll can be set in the Item panel.

Bone Roll

After some clean up and redoing the animation of these bones, the final result, shown in the GIF below, is obtained.

Final Result

Notice how only one channel (the z-rotation) was animated. The revised blend file is attached below.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you so much! This has been super useful and helpful from now on I can rig even cleaner including the use of Keying Sets was a super useful thing to use $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 28 at 14:30
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    $\begingroup$ You're welcome! $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 28 at 14:32

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