Rotating Sphere around angled axis

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 14:32:19 GMT

Hi everyone,,

I am trying to animate a sphere that is 26 degrees tilted (like a globe). Unfortunately I cannot get it to rotate around its own axis. I have frozen transformations and had a look at the local rotation axis. So far it hasn't worked and even rotating it manually in keyframes results in the sphere tumbling around. This should be a simple animations, but I'm stumped. Any advice?

Re: Rotating Sphere around angled axis

brentmc — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 15:33:18 GMT

Hi,

When animating rotation the order in which you apply the rotations matters so to better visualize the effect one rotation channel has on the next one I recommend changing the rotate tool's axis orientation to Gimbal mode. (in the tool settings or modeling toolkit panel)

I assume you tried to tilt the sphere by rotating in X and then spin it by animating in Y.

This won't work because the default rotation order for the sphere is XYZ which means rotating in X will have no effect on the orientation of the Y axis because it is applied first. There are a couple of ways to fix this.

1) Tilt your sphere by rotating around the Z axis (instead of X) and animate the spin around Y

2) Group your sphere (Ctrl+G) to create a transform above it. Apply the tilt rotation to the group and animate the spin on the original sphere

You can even go into the attribute editor and change the rotation order on the sphere if you want to ensure Y is first. (e.g. YXZ)

Sometime you need to do this to get the right results. For example, when animating a freely moving camera a rotation order of ZXY works best since it better matches the Pan/Tilt/Roll of a physical camera.

Brent

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Rotating Sphere around angled axis

Re: Rotating Sphere around angled axis