Rotation orders

Rotation orders are perhaps one of the most neglected areas of rigging and yet they have a major impact on the stability of the rig and usability for the animators. Setting the correct orders can save hours of work trying understand curves that make no sense and struggling to clean up wierd rotation pops in a single animation. Multiply that over all animations for a character, all characters in a project and suddenly the importance of getting this right becomes self evident.

The rotation order of a node is basically the order that rotation axis are evaluated. By default Maya creates nodes with an order of xyz which is generally not the optimal setting.