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I'm trying to rotate the blades of a windmill for an animation but the windmill is already at an angle. When I keyframe it on its own axis (after pressing Ctrl+Alt+Space) and rotate it, the blades spin inwards during the animation before coming back at the end. I've tried locking the other axis but that keeps the blades from rotating back to the right orientation. Also, whenever I rotate the object 360 degrees it turns the 360 into a really small number (0.0001) so it plays forward hallway then backwards (with a 180 degree keyframe halfway). How do I fix this?

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Actually, 3D softwares struggle to rotate an object that is already tilted on another of its axis. That's why it's better to keep the object straight, rotate it on the wanted axis, parent it to an empty, and tilt the empty, not the object itself.

Also, take note that the animation won’t take your 3D View Pivot Center setting into account, it will use the object's origin.

About the rotation value: you should choose 180°, then, in the Graph Editor, shift E Linear Extrapolation so that it understands that it needs to go indefinitely with a constant speed.

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  • $\begingroup$ This worked perfectly, thank you so much! $\endgroup$
    – Keyk123
    Commented Jan 25, 2019 at 16:06
  • $\begingroup$ This is an old issue but just wanted to comment that if the interpolation doesn't fix the rotation reversing, you sometimes just need more keyframes. Quaternion rotation will often find the shortest path to the next keyframe, and sometimes that means going back the way you came. More keyframes ensures the shortest path is the direction you intended. $\endgroup$
    – Dale Cieslak
    Commented Oct 12, 2021 at 20:21

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