Changing rotate order of controls, also gimbal rotation mode?

Development Character & Animation
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Hi, trying to animate in Unreal and hit some blocker (for me) to animate like I do in other DCC tools. 2 questions.

  1. How can I change the rotate order of my rig controls? I’m not even sure where I can check to see the current rotate order.
  2. Can I rotate my rig control in Gimbal mode? Or any way to visualize current controller orientation in gizmo mode?

Thanks!

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Sorry for bump. Is there any insight on this? I can’t be the only animator who came from Maya finding the lack of gimbal rotation mode super difficult to animate…

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Hey there @atsbomb! Welcome back to the community! There is no true 1:1 analog to Maya’s Gimbal rotation mode, however depending on your use there’s multiple ways of handling G-lock.

By rotate order, do you mean locking specific axes in control rig?

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@SupportiveEntity Thanks, yeah I figured after looking up various sources that Unreal Engine doesn’t provide 1:1 maya’s gimbal rotation mode. I guess it’s a difference between DCC tool and Game Engine, Game Engine’s focus seems to be to avoid a gimbal lock at all cost while in DCC tool you’d exclusively want to visualize specific axis for a finer control (for human anyway). Here, I’m NOT trying to avoid gimbal lock per se, rather having a gimbal lock is more desirable if I may say. I’ll explain it below.

By rotate order, do you mean locking specific axes in control rig?

Not quite. The intention of using gimbal rotation mode or switching the rotate order is to have a curve that represents spatial motion cleanly. Say if I want to adjust a spacing of certain rotation over time, I don’t want to edit 3 curves in Curve Editor. In maya, (I think it’s safe to say) many film animators do change the rotate order to gain the desired axis represented in the Graph Editor as a single curve, so that we can control spacing more intuitively. Below is a link to a pretty popular tool among animators.

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For 2. go into Editor Preferences, search for “gizmo”

Enable “Experimental gizmo” and “Explicit Rotation”.

The explicit rotation is a gimbal manipulator mode that is available in the viewport manipulator drop-down once enabled like this (top-left corner of the viewport, right-click → explicit or choose via … menu)

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@eulerIntegrator Sweeet! This is exactly what I was looking for. Huge thanks!

Now that the gimbal gizmo is in play, I think I can try to work around my first issue by projecting the current animation into temp locator (actor) with desired rotate order (and let it drive the original).

Thank you so much, this helps me commiting more to fully animating in Unreal.

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