Zero-out Rotation Axis in Maya

Recently while working on some rigs, I was needed to strictly move the current skinned finger joints position to match a newly given set of finger joints by another TD. Usually, we should receive nicely oriented joints but it was not the case. Not only the rotations and joint orient values are messy, but there is also rotation axis value. If I were to directly snap to the new joints (following its translation + rotation), my joints will be messed up too.

It has been awhile since I last dealt with such a problem, so I forgot I solved it. Thanks to Goggle Search, someone has shared their solution, so I thought more people can benefits from it.

Basically, it is a short script to zero-out Rotation Axis in the joint without affecting the rest of the children joints. Pretty need and simple. Just select the joints that you would like to zero out the rotation axis values, and run this:

joint -e -zso;

Voila! It worked flawlessly. I think my old method required a bunch of calculations but this is magical. Hope it helps.

Thank you to Oana Jones for this sharing at :

http://oanajones.blogspot.my/2013/08/zero-out-rotation-axis-in-maya.html