Gimbal Lock

Whilst working on the attack animation I came up against gimbal lock. I've never really had too much of a problem with it, but here it completely destroyed the movement of my staff. From the images below you can see what gimbal lock looks like with the focus on tangents. The staff solving inverse kinematics are solving incorrectly because of gimbal lock, and so to remove it I had to use a tool called 'Euler Filter'. I selected the problematic tangents and then used Euler Filter.

From this second image you can see the tangents have now been solved and they curve smoothly, with the staff's inverse kinematics solving as they should do to create a smooth arcing animation.