Animation flipped in wrong direction?

When I try to actually animate a handheld Axe attached to a first person camera, the axe, which in the scene is placed in view of the camera, flips around to the opposite side of the camera whenever it is animated.

Here’s a shot of the game when it is not running:

and Here’s a shot of the game when it is running:

Notice the orientation of the axe relative to the camera’s view.

What’s going wrong here? My animations were exported in FBX from 3ds max. My project files (super small size), including relevant FBX with its animations, are uploaded to mediafire for download here: Perceptive Shift

Any help is seriously appreciated. I’ve worked at this for hours and feel like I’ve done everything under the sun to get it right, but it’s not right somehow.

Hi @domportera,

I had lots of problems with this issue too. The only way I managed to get it under control was to create an empty game object, and put your rotating prop (in this case, the axe) inside it. I also zeroed out most of the prop’s position information too, altho I am not sure if that is a necessary step.

This seems to be a particular problem with objects attached to other objects (eg, a sword in a character’s hand). I think the rotation offset is something to do with the fact 3DS Max has Z as the up axis (instead of Y). Trying to accommodate or account for the rotation offset in the original Max file will really fry your brain (because rotating the prop in the original file will not spin it on the same axis inside Unity), so I found it best to tackle the issue inside Unity by just sticking it inside a new, stable object. This seems to stop the rotation changing on PLAY - altho you might need to create a brand new pre-fab or even new project before it will update correctly and behave.