This is not an answer to your question but a side note which you may want to take into consideration.

In your worksheet you have

    q := {q1(t), q2(t), q3(t), q4(t)};
    xm1 := q[1];
    xm2 := q[1] + l1 * cos(q[2]);

You have specified q as a set.  The order of the elements of the set is not necessarily predetermined, so there is no quarantee that q[1] will produce q1(t).  To fix the order of elements in q, give it as list rather than a set, as in

    q := [q1(t), q2(t), q3(t), q4(t)];

@acer What you are suggesting certainly makes sense.  Putting the orientation information in the PlotComponent should be no more demanding than putting it in Maple's toolbar, as it's done currently for some of 3D plots.  I hope to see that in a Maple in the near future.

Hello Acer, thanks for your very helpful response.  It solves my immediate problem.

I attempted to extend your examples by querying indets(G,'specfunc(:-ORIENTATION)') in order to get the plot's current orientation but it just returned the empty set.  I did "lprint(G)" to see G's contents but apparently there is no orientation information in it.  Is there some other trick to extract a 3D plot's orientation information?

I know that normally one can read the orientation angles theta, phi, and psi in Maple's toolbar.  Unfortunately that toolbar is not available when Maple displays an animation.

Rouben