Good heavens, ronstuff, thank you for taking my post in such a good spirit. If more people could discuss their pet ideas with such open-mindedness and courtesy, 'rosity would be a much happier place.

And thank you for bringing the subject up again. Before, I was just content with understanding why gimbal lock happened within the Poser system. Your post forced me to ask the (come to think of it, obvious) question, "Why does Poser use this system? Aren't there others?"

And that's still a good question. Trying some more refined Google searches linking those 3d software programs with "gimbal lock," I'm beginning to get the impression that a lot of them have found various ways of finessing gimbal lock problems that were more prominent in earlier versions. (Maybe Max is one of them.) So maybe there's hope for Poser.

And as far as the tradeoff -- the problem Poser avoids by living with gimbal lock -- so far I've only seen little hints of what that is. I'd love to know, and I'm sure you would too. I think we are most likely to find it by following up the medical biomechanics links; apparently the doctors who reconstruct shoulders and hips face a similar tradeoff when trying to model those joints.

I had a tooth extracted today, so I literally have a hole in my head and am probably not going to learn anything more about this tonight. I didn't mean to leave the false impression that I actually understand Euler angles or Quaternions from a math standpoint (or any other standpoint) -- I was just summarizing the articles I saw in Google. With your CAD and programming experience, you will probably get more out of those references than I do.

But if I do turn up anything on the nature of the tradeoff, I will post it here. And I'll be very interested in anything you learn about this as well.

Thanks again for making this a real dialogue and not battling rants.

Bill