u/notcrumble

Hey everyone,
I'm learning some basic rigging skills currently, using a series of tutorial videos sent by a teacher at my school (I'm in a different section, I don't attend their classes).

Second in said series is a simple tutorial on rigging a bouncing ball. They use a lattice to squash and stretch it, and a controller to rotate said lattice. To be able to stretch it whichever way they want, they use a simple inversion setup in the Node Editor, so that the ball rotates countrary to the lattice. It's supposed to keep the ball steady no matter the lattice's angle, but mine only works so long as one rotation angle is affected. Two or more seem to break the setup. I've tried changing the rotation to world instead of object, with no success. After discussing it with a friend with no Maya expertise, but who's pretty good at math, he asked if I could break it down into a matrix. I found a node that seemed to do just that, and it works, but I don't understand what the difference is.

Here's all the visuals so you can take a look!

My hierarchy

My node editor (before the matrix)

My multiply/divide node (to invert rotation)

Example video of the rotation working fine on one axis, and breaking on multiple axis (axes?)

The setup that made it work, kind of thrown together on vibes (Friend explained to me that a matrix is supposed to be a cluster of values instead of the 3 separate rotation values, but I still struggle to understand why the first setup doesn't work, and it bugs me haha)

Any expertise would be lovely, thanks for reading!