Dustin Nelson is an artist who is currently working for Bioware, and has created this 15 min tutorial where he explains some of the solutions using maya that can be used to create an animation control for objects that may be off axis. Typically, when objects are created, there are rarely concerns that the rotational axis would need to be off center. Below, you can see an example of this with a quick representation of a finger that is oriented with the grid. Here the rotational controls of the curves for the objects will clearly work well for animation.
with the hand of a typical character model however, the fingers would be fanned out, leaving most of the fingers off axis with the grid. In this case the controls’ rotations would not be conducive for animation at all.
The solution would be to develop a correct control axis that would work better for animation of the fingers; Where the control rotations were in relative alignment with each finger. An example of such a setup, would look something like this.
Dustin shows three methods to achieve this, the first is by displaying and using a joint’s handle, the second is by parenting a control curve shape node without its transform to a joint, and finally the third method is by creating group nodes to hide transform values.
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good maya tutorial i also liked the video