I'm having trouble getting axes to behave properly. I was working through a tutorial on Digital Tutors, creating custom channels to rotate two identical objects (mounted guns on a space ship). For this to work, I had to re-orient the axes to align them to the angle of the guns. This worked perfectly on the first gun, but the other one is doing weird stuff. First, I press D and Control (on a Mac) to align the axis orientation with the long axis of the gun barrel. Then I rotate it around that axis and it rotates just fine, except that the channel box shows rotation along all three axes. With the first gun, rotating the gun correctly shows rotation around the x axis only in the channel box. When I re-select the second gun, I find that the axis has returned to its original orientation. With the first gun, there seems to be no correspondence between the rotation and translation axes; even though I aligned rotation to follow the angle of the gun barrel, when I switch to the translation axes, they are still aligned with the world coordinates. Likewise, the rotation rings don't seem to correspond to the same axes as the translation handles; for example, while the green Y axis ring is perpendicular to the green Y translation handle, the blue and red rings are parallel to the Z and X handles (in the first gun, the one that works). In the second gun, the one that doesn't work, all the rings are perpendicular to the corresponding handles. Also, when I re-orient the second gun and swith between rotation and translation tools, the translation axes are aligned the same way. Basically, I don't understand at all how Maya handles axis orientation and I'm hoping that someone can explain it to me.
