Help sought animating a backwards spinning flip.

Lindmark

Good evening, animation rookie here.
I've been trying to replicate the flip as seen at 0:04 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhYWEP-HiCk&index=3&list=PLb78d0p4ZglgnR_X-8rhTVm18DJsPsZoH

But I've gotten stuck at the spinning of the body as he flips.
When I try to rotate the body in the local Y-axis I get rotation in all axises (is the plural of axis axises?).
This results in pretty funny-looking rotation, but is not what I want.

Are there any of you maya/animation-in-general gurus out there with a solution to my problem?

Eric Chadwick

I moved your thread to the Animation section.

Hito

Probably the software interpolating back to 0 rotation instead of 360 or 720 through the shortest direction. Usually happens in situations like this with Euler interpolation. Try switching the rotation gizmo to Gimbal mode so you can see what the axis are actually doing in space, if any of the axis cross over another one at some point you'll get weird rotation flips. run Euler Filter in graph editor on the object, that will sort this kind of thing out most of the time. You get rotation in all 3 axis because the curves are in world space, that's pretty normal.

brimblashman

It will help to have a secondary controller to avoid getting into a gimbal mess.
I normally have a child of the hips control to use during this sort of motion. As you won't really be able to avoid gimbal lock, and at certain points in the flip you won't be able to easily rotate in certain directions.
If you animate the spin in one axis on the main control then any leaning mid spin can be applied with the "gimbal" control (which will be much closer to 0,0,0 in it's rotation)
It's a bit confusing at first but you can avoid having all 3 axis at crazy values after the flip, or interpolating very strangely mid motion.