YOU, yes you behind the hypershade! Stand still laddie!
Yes Pink Floyd is still just as amazing today as he was 20 years ago sitting in a speaker egg chair experiencing Dark side of the moon for the first time.
Anyway, it's been a while and I am in need of a good blogging. Mmmm feels so good.
Joints need to be overhauled. They need to use quaternian rotations so they don't flip as with euiler rotations. But for the time being we need to just grin and bare it. This is just my recommendation but it works for me.
1 : You can translate, scale or rotate the joint to your hearts content as long as you freeze the transforms before you orient them. As long as your rotations and scale are 0, your cool.
2 : This is the big one! Make absolutely sure that under your transform attributes in the attribute editor are all 0, or zero, or what ever version of nada you believe in. This attribute will screw up your constraints big time because this attribute is added after the constraint. E.g. if your rotate axis X is 90 but your rotate X is 0 and you parent without offset it will rotate X 90 degrees when you parent even if all the rotations are 0.
Non-zero rotate axis attributes usually happen if you go into component mode and rotate the joints transform axis.
So all to all those people who say never rotate a joint, or always rotate never translate, or vice verca, in the end the one thing that will bite you in the ass is the rotate axis.
This is a side note and is completely personal preference but if you must have a clean joint this is what it should look like.
There should be only one axis with translation, all of your rotations should be zero and your scale should be 1 across the board. Rotation axis should be zero. and your joint orient attributes should only have one non zero number. This is a clean joint that when constrained or scaled or translated it does not flip or jump, it will move along the joint not at some strange angle. This is one of the secrets of stretchy or rubber tube limbs.
TLDR: The rotate axis attribute of a joint will fuck your day up and then piss in your cornflakes.
