Seem to start happening like a few months ago. We’re on Maya 8 patch 6. We’re getting rotations at or near 0 popping 360 degrees. I can constraint one object to another and it’s fine, then I parent the object to a null and it goes from 0 to 360. Anyone else having this? Is there a fix?

Advise you upgrade to 8.5 SP1a if possible. 8.0 is known to be buggy.

I’m not sure I understand the problem. If you’re trying to use an Orient Constraint and a parent-child link on the same object, you’ll have problems because they are both trying to do the same thing. If you want rotation to be driven by one object, but position to be driven by another, then use an Orient Constraint and a Point Constraint. Don’t use direct parent-child linking at all.

To solve gimbal lock problems, try changing the rotation order in the objects’ transform nodes. You can also try changing the rotation type. That’s done in the Graph Editor. Select the rotation channels and go to Curves > Change Rotation Interp > Synchronized Quaternion. This uses a different algorithm to calculate rotations, and may be less susceptible to flipping.

My company is sort of locked into Maya 8 patch 6 for now, so upgrading isn’t an option. I don’t know if it happens in Maya 8.5.

No, I do not have multiple constraints on an object. What I was saying is that ANY constraint effecting rotation seems to flip at 0. I can constraint one object to another (type doesn’t matter, orient, parent, pick one) and everything seems fine. I parent the slave to something and it’s 0 rotate will flip in 360 in one, sometimes two axis. I don’t see why a rotate order would make something do a 360, but we tried that and tried the rotation interp as well. We also tried to change the interp type on the constraint node itself, which used to work fine for these situations but now seems to do nothing.

Are you sure it’s not just the old buggy behavior of ALL interactive rotations? Maya has traditionally been really bad at interpreting what rotation value to use when the manipulator value goes negative or beyond 360. This required a lot of fcurve editing to put things to rights. It appears to have been fixed in 8.5.

As a test, try keying the same sorts of rotations on objects that aren’t constrained to anything. If you get flipping there, then I’d say upgrading is pretty high priority.