Everything is in the title.
Would be cool to not have those kind of choice hard-coded ?
Especially since the industry standard softwares (except 3ds max) are Y up axis.
M.
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Id like this too, for compatibility with certain games
Also the bone axis doesn’t play well with other engines or games… since Blender uses Y forward instead of 3Ds max’s Z forward?
I am getting turned off right at the donut tutorial in BlenderGuru because of my inability to flip the axis. I am a Maya guy…and I know Blender developers can care less about me as one person, but if they can figure out a way to flip axis, many more will feel comfortable switching or even trying Blender. SynthEyes is able to accommodate this flexibility (granted it is not a free software), why not Blender?
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Is this simply having the view-port navigation considering a different axis up?
Did anyone investigate all the functionality which would need to be changed to support this properly?
These projects normally end up being more involved then you might first expect.
Even though I am an experienced Blender user, every other 3d app and game engine I use has Y as the up axis. You do tend to get used to having to mentally flip the y and z axis when modelling, but I find it much harder to do when animating and rigging. An option to flip the axis would be most welcome, but most likely is an incredible amount of work!
@ideasman42: I guess what’s been asked for here is to be able to change the underlying coordinate system. 4 Different system, seem to exist out there commonly. Y axis up, or z axis up and both versions within right hand and left hand coordinate systems. It would be fantastic if these options would be supported, but perhaps its easier if just right handed coordinate systems are supported. 
I would expect difficulties if in the blendercode hard coded axis usages exist, as well I think transforming existing animations to another coordinate systems could contain difficulties, especially as the gimbal lock will appear in different situations. But saving the coordinate system in the blend file and forbid changes to the coordinate system setup if animations exist, could be a simple way to remedy this.
Its been a great pain for me because I work on character models for a game engine that uses Y axis up too, so the rigs that import are twisted bones and you cant really work with that.
The Exporter / Importer cant flip the axis.
So I have to work with weird orientated bones I cant mess with much.
It’d be easier if everyone just agree’d to use Y axis up for bones since that is what everything uses.
Its also a pain since I cant use any Animation rigs on it because the Left and Right are not interchangeable at all due to the bones using Y forward.
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I wouldn’t set my expectations too high. As Jamez said, this can easily turn into much work. Perhaps some aspects of this can be achieved, without the need to extend the mathlibrary and manually touching everything, as blender eg already has different matrix multiplication orders, but things like this need some careful thoughts if an abstraction layer can be implemented and getting it to a point where it could be changed during work is just another level.
But I’d really love to have it too!!! 
This is the kind of problem I’d be worried about. Adding a feature that…
- Causes otherwise avoidable incompatibilities when people work in a team or share files.
- Cause work for developers and add-on authors to support.
Even ignoring the amount of work to support this, it’s that making something configurable ends up causing more problems then it solves, since using a different up axis is something you can get used to, as is the case with many other differences between applications.
It’s probably simpler to support this at import/export time, compared to supporting it at the application level.
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I’ve also experienced frustrations with this. Makes lots of issues when exporting to game engines. Everyone who works with Blender + Unity or Unreal experiences these issues for example, it complicates animation and programmatic transformation in game.
The FBX exporter has these options for changing the Up and Forward axis, and the Primary and Secondary Bone Axis (whatever those are), but I’ve never found any configuration that works. I think the key is in the Apply Transform toggle, however, as the tooltip says it’s broken with armatures.
I think our best bet is to get these transformations handled on export since the exporter already has partially-finished features that would do this, it seems. At least for the people for whom the issue is compatibility with other 3D apps / game engines (and as I see it this is actually a huge issue…)
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@ideasman42 Ok, partially agreed.But on the other hand it could also help a team eg in a unity or ue4 dev team to align blender to the platform they are producing assets for.
Sure a better import/export with comfortable setups that take care of coordinate systems, rotation orders, and in the best case some predefined setups for custom widespread platforms would ease a lot of that pain. Is something like that planned?
So you’re already against it or do you have better ideas for adding such an option?
I mean for sure could it be possible to embed it without any of my proposed restrictions. And just to make that clear, The idea of another coordinate system being internally supported is no comfort feature, It guarantees that the modeling fits to the needed output, it makes exporting easier and guarantees that the animated result doesn’t end in singularities.
The developer refused to support it for some unknown reason, even though it’s annoying
Not to mention FBX importing of rigged characters is a mess most of the time for me.
I understand Blender has used Z up Bone Axis since forever and it’s probably problematic to change or support industry standard, but still, it’s still a thorn in peoples sides, especially when the Import/Export dev refuses to support bone axis flipping for stupid reasons. Leaving us with messed up bones.
I’m talking about the Source engine, .smd format btw. His workaround was rotating the bones on their sides and using Spheres as shapes, the skeleton doesn’t support Syymtery either because of the naming convention having L and R in the centre of the names.
And cant use bone constraints because its all a bunch of small-scaled bones that cant connect to each other ever or the animations won’t work in-game.
Bumping this thread because it’s bothering me once more today,
I and all the users of this thread would like this to be really investigated.
Please add a Maya like axis option. That’s more important than it seems for cross software collaboration and user habits.
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I’m still annoyed by it and probably the entire community of Blender that works with Source engine and possibly others that have issues…