3ds max Hierarchies Linking objects You're offsetting the true rotations according to a point of reference which just happens to be the pivot point of the object. But that's not nescessarily the orientation of the animation channels that drive the rotation. So without getting to technical, if we just switch over to one of these other modes, we'll see a visual demonstration of what the issue is. Let's say I go over world coordinates and then I rotate around one axis. And I can see okay, well one axis is changing, that's fine. I'll rotate around another axis, and all of a sudden, all of the channels are changing. I think I'm only rotating around this red x-axis, but in fact in reality, under the hood, all of the rotation channels are being animated. And this is terrible because in this situation you won't be able to control animation and objects will spin wildly out of control and you won't know why. And it's because you're not actually animating what you think you're animating. And this will happen whether you're in world mode or local mode or any mode other than Gimbal.
So I'll undo those rotations with Control + z, go back to where I was. Switch over to Gimbal coordinate system. And now when I rotate around one axis, that's the only axis that actually updates in the transform type in dialog. So this is very important for animation. All right, I'll undo those rotations. So you'll notice that, although only one axis is updating here the orientation of the rotation axes themselves is changing when we use Gimbal coordinates. So if I rotate around the y-axis, which is the green circle, notice that the red x-axis is following. And this is an indicator that there is indeed an internal hierarchy to the rotation axes, and some of those axes follow others in an order of operations. It's not a chronological order, it all happens simultaneously, it's just an order of calculations.
