cliff dive animation problem

I’ve been using Orion Neville’s Maya script to do simple animations for awhile with satisfactory results. Since my property has cliffs next to water I thought it would fun to try my hand at a cliff diving animation. This is the first time that I have tried an animation that has much of a change in elevation.

In the animation the diver takes a step forward, jumps into the air, goes into a tuck position, does one forward revolution coming out of the tuck and entering the water.
Well that’s how it’s supposed to work and how it looks in Maya. After uploading as “no loop”, when I test it with play in world here is what happens. The driver takes her step off the cliff, goes into the tuck and begins the forward revolution. Midway through the revolution instead of continuing clockwise as intended the animation reverses the flip in a counter clockwise manner.

At that point the driver comes out of the tuck and continues on down towards the water as designed BUT never finishes the animation to reach the water.

So what I have here are two questions. When doing flip type animations is there a limitation to the amount of “root_control” rotation and is there a limit to the change in height an animation can make? My drive animation was made for about 20 meters but seems to stop after 10. Any tips or points in the right direction are most appreciated.

add a keyframe thru the rotation maybe two
what happens with rotations they travel the shortest distance around

ok thanks I'll go ahead and do that. Do you know of any height limitations or should I be able to jump as far down as animation time?

You can only move 10 metres from the start point of an animation - and you will need a script to move your avatar to the end of your dive. I've never been able to achieve more than 3 full rotations in an animation either. I don't think SL can recognise more than 3 times 360 degrees in one rotational direction.

Thanks for the info. Is it possible to chain the animations via a script without it looking jerky?

In your dive you can move 5 meters up and 5 meters down. So you can't start your animation and dive down 10 meters. You'd have to make your animation initially put you five meters above your root point and then you can animate going down 10 meters. When you stop the animation you will end up at the midway root point though.

The problem of course is that the avatar jumps around and it doesn't look very good.

You might want to try a poseball that actually moves down into the water. You can adjust distances easily and when you get off the poseball you get off in the water.

okay thanks I'll give the poseball a try.

The Swimmer HUD uses a different approach that works pretty well. I don't know how it's done, but it appears that there's a springboard animation followed by a diving pose, all triggered by the forward arrow on the keyboard when the dive button is turned on from the HUD. Once below the water line, the swimming buoyancy scripts take over to bring you back to the surface.