I do it same way Haiddasalami mentions. Check out the Pivot section under the transform node(not the shape that is). It retains the original values in the rotation/scale pivots. There are other hacky ways to do it, but this one I find to be the easiest and cleanest. If for some reason you would have 0,0,0 rotate/scale…
I agree its can be hard to work with and would be easier if it was oriented to screen space however it represents a coordinate system. That system has a + and - side to it. When you're looking at it from the negative side, you're looking at the back of the coordinate system. It would be like modeling on the bottom of the…
timotronprime explained it better than I did. Don't be scared of animating chains of bones in a case like this, its actually very easy to do. Select all of the bones, set your pivot to "local" and "use pivot point center" (the only option if you have autokey turned on) and then rotate the bones. Each bone will rotate from…