[Bf-funboard] Eular rotation vs Quarternion rotation

[Bassam Kurdali]

Eulers won't work for character animation. 
But, could be OK to have switchable types (i.e. you can make a bone a "euler bone" or a "quat bone") quats would be good for 90% of character animation, and eulers would be good for wheels/geers/spinning things.

We could also ask that quats could be editable as eulers- the IPO editor can pretend/lie to us :) and show eulers. Again , this should be optional. Animation master has a scheme like this.
The one thing that could be a problem is the conversion from quat to euler. they are not one to one, but I think it is doable with some limitations.
The last bit is similar to Horace's suggestion, and is what is doable in Animation Master (hash's animation package). I don't know about Maya, but just because "Maya does X" doesn't mean it's right (it might be) - Maya users often complain about stuff Maya does wrong.

It's a bit arrogant to say quaternions are there for the benefit of the programer. I was animating in the past in euler only packages, and *everybody* was screaming about gimbal lock. That's why programmers gave us quaternions, and gimbal lock is virtually gone.
Yes, it might be a huge problem for the coders depending on the code base. I wouldn't force this as a primary problem (it's more "it would be nice" than "it is needed") because we have workarounds.

Bassam