rotate a bone on its own axis...

Support Animation and Rigging
1

hi all

i have tried a couple of the different turials here, and have been learning a ton. however i am having a small problem with rotating a bone…

i have a setup where there is a sphere with 3 meshes protruding from it (120 degrees apart). Now, i want to control each of the protrusions independently of each other. So i have a bone for each protrusion. Each bone is parented to the control bone of the sphere.

now, i want to rotate any of the protrusions, but only around their own set of axes! when i have the axes drawn, i can see that the X axis at the root of the bone is correctly oriented for how i want to rotate around it. however, in pose mode, when trying to rotate the bone, it either rotates on a local axis that is orthogonal to the global axis, or the global axis, which doesnt really help me :frowning:

http://pdavid.sytes.net:8080/pose.jpg

you can see the one bone here, the problem is not rotating this one, but rather the two other bones that will be to the left of it. they are at odd angles, and as such do not rotate in the direction i want (around the Z axis of the bone shown in the image).

anyone help me out here? is there some hot key that i am missing or something?

tia

2

The widget Have a local mode.
It’s only accessible from widget though. You can’t do it by g/r/s.

It shoul dbe fixed though.

3

actually, i found a solution thanks to some help on #BlenderChat…

i added a new armature just for the toes, and inserted the bones in top-down view.

this gave each toe an appropriate local axis.

then i joined this armature to my main armature, and the bones kept their local orientation correctly. Thus when rotating, i could restrict on the appropriate axis, and the “toe” would move appropriately!