Rotation Trajectories

While regular Trajectories are useful for understanding and altering characteristics of the motion, they do not tell you anything about object rotation.

This might be an issue in some cases. Specifically for these cases, Rotation Trajectories are implemented.

A rotation trajectory renders object rotation for every selected frame and allows you to make adjustments to these rotations.

Enabling Rotation Trajectories

To enable rotation trajectories:

1. Switch to the Box Controller Mode:

2. Select a Box Controller

3. Select an interval on the Timeline.

4. Enable Rotation trajectories on the Toolbar:

Disabling Rotation Trajectories

To disable Rotation Trajectories:

1. Click the Rotation trajectories button one more time.

Doing so will switch it back to the regular Translation trajectories.

Settings

Rotation Trajectories can operate in several modes:

Global with translation

In this mode, rotation vectors follow the general trajectory of the selected object (like the Rotation manipulator arrow would have on the corresponding frames).

Global

Shows rotations in relation to the current frame.

Local

Shows object rotations in relation to its parent. If the selected object has no parent, its Local rotation is equal to Global.

Rotated axis
These buttons are used for choosing the coordinate axis (X, Y or Z) on which rotation vectors should lie.

Rotation plane
Sets the coordinate axis (X, Y or Z) on which trajectory points can be moved. 
The Free setting means that points can be move along all three axes.

Rotate hierarchy
If this is enabled, Box Controllers will rotate when you rotate their parents.

Rotator scale
Sets the scale for the Rotation Trajectory.

Using Rotation Trajectories

This feature is useful when you want to visualize and remove unnecessary rotations, during mocap cleaning for example.

To edit particular points of the Rotation Trajectory:

1. Enable Trajectory Edit Mode:

2. Select points on the trajectory.

3. Apply Manipulators to them:

As usual, changing rotation on a keyframe would affect every frame on the neighbouring intervals (as shown above). Changing rotation on a regular frame would only affect that frame (interpolation on the corresponding interval would change to the Fixed type).

Rotation trajectories are intended only for adjusting object rotations. To deal with positions, use regular Trajectories.

See Also

Trajectories