Simple and effective Quaternion rotations? Could it be true?
Rigging a character is dependent somewhat on creating proper twist motion. A character’s arm or leg needs to move in a variety of ways, and twisting is an important one.
QuatTwist is a Maya plug-in which provides an easy solution for creating twist functionality for any kind of character rig
What is surprising is that there isn’t a general solution in 3D applications, such as Maya. To be clear, there are a few ways that you can get around flipping issues in Maya. Most are bespoke— there are just no “out of the box” solutions.
Flipping is something that is inherent with Euler rotations. Using Quaternion rotations can solve those issues. They are just difficult for the average artist to understand. This is why The Brave Rabbit produced a single node for Maya that can handle “all the twisting you ever wanted”. It’s name is the QuatTwist node for Autodesk Maya.
Connect the QuatTwist node to any transform you want to handle the twisting action. The node will gather the relevant quaternion information for the calculation.
QuatTwist can also provide more control, including segmentation attributes. This can reduce the need for more nodes, and twist-related networks.
You can download QuatTwist for free at Brave Rabbit. The plugin works with Maya 2012 and up, on MacOS, Windows, and Linux.
