rotation flip Maya

I’m making a pole dance animation with Maya and experiencing the following problem. Half way through the dance I have the dancer go from working the pole to dropping to her knees and crawling across the floor. My problem occurs right at the point of transition of going from being vertical to horizontal crawling. Although the animation appears fine when viewed in Maya when I go to upload in SL right at the point where my dancer is supposed to start crawling on all fours the animation flips. The animation continues to play out with all joints rotating as intended except that the character is now rotated out of position for the last part.

I’m using the rig and MEL script that where available from this forum a while back. Is there a limit to the amount of rotation that can be applied to the root_control? How do people make animation where they go from being vertical to horizontal? Any help, advice or points in the right direction are much appreciated.

One possible problem could be that SL will only recognise the overall figure orientation by reference to the HIP joint - as the HIP is the root in the SL avatar. Possibly you moved your figure in Maya using a different parameter - such as moving the whole body? SL does not recognise this - you will need to rotate the figure at the HIP joint to move from vertical to horizontal and move the HIP down to the floor to get the figure onto the knees.

I believe there is a limit to the degrees of rotation that SL can recognise as I have never managed to rotate a figure more than 3 times in any one direction - anything more just doesn't seem to be recognised at upload.

I know there's a long-standing bug in the rig, which causes problems if you rotate the body backwards. So things slip & fall type animations have always been problematic with it. This is the first I've heard of trouble with rotating forward, though.

But then again, I've never actually tried to go a full 90 degrees or more with it. I'm not that active of an animator. It's certainly possible the bug imposes a limit in both directions.

It might be worthwhile to experiment with some simple poses, rotating the hip 10-degree increments or so, one axis at a time, to find exactly what the limit is in each direction.

Thank you Deira and Chosen for your replies and suggestions. The exporter rig I’m using is the one generously provided by Orion Neville almost three years ago.

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In this thread Orion states:

“Ok, I see what you're talking about. I was able to reproduce a similar effect by rotating the root control downward on X 90 degrees or so, and then rotating it again on its local Y while it was in that position. This looks like some sort of problem with the exporter.

I was able to find a hack. If you key two or three extra frames of the root control in each position, sometimes this fixes the problem and other times it lessens it. I'm going to continue messing with this to look for a better solution. I think for the most part you're pretty safe if you keep the root rotations toned-down. But keeping things toned-down sucks.”

Has anyone made a rig or exporter that is more recent than this one? I have no problem making my own rig but lack the MEL skills to make an exporter. Also by "If you key two or three extra frames of the root control in each position" does Orion mean for example that if I have a root_control keyed at frame 30 that I should key again at 29 and 31?

I read the rest of the way through the thread but didn't see any further comments on this issue.

Further testing using the graph editor to rotate only the X axis of the root_control revealed that after approximately 85 degrees any further rotation appeared to be transferred to the Y rotation when imported into SL. Everything was fine viewed in Maya and I insured that there was no rotation applied to the root_control other than that to the X axis. I was able to offset how the animation appeared in Maya by adding a small amount off negative rotation to the Y axis. Not sure what's going on with the export script but something seems to be off.