Rotation Order

I’m planning on making the rotation orders on a few my rig controls keyable. I’m using the Mery rig as reference, and I notice that on this rig there is a different attribute called ‘RotOrder’ that plugs directly into the rotationOrder attribute. “Why not just make the rotationOrder attribute keyable?” I thought. Is there any benefit from using this round about method of controlling the rotationOrder?

you don’t want it keyable – even if it can be, which I don’t think it can in vanilla maya - because it changes the meaning of the rotation fcurves. 45, 10, 45 in XYZ is not the same as 45, 10, 45 in YZX or whatever. It’s OK to expose it in the channel box so people don’t have to dig for it – but a chance set key will totally break animations in wierd ways. Plus it’s an enum value so you’d have bizarre artifacts if you tried to interp between two values - the steps in between are discontinuous so only step keys are even possibly any use

I wasn’t thinking that animators would LERP between rotation orders. I was thinking that when animation gets exported to the library, that it would be stored since it’s keyable. My main concern is that animators would accidentally change the rotation order of the controls, since they are enums, like you said. I noticed this feature on the mery rig, and that it is keyable.

Hmmm… I guess that would work, though you probably want a script to make sure that there is only ever one key on that channel