Animation issue: character with swaying feet

Unity Engine
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1

Hi there, I’ve been having an issue with an animation in Unity that I cannot seem to solve.
My problem: I have a simple talking animation in which the character’s feet are planted to the ground with some hip movement and gesturing (just to make it look natural).
The feet don’t stay in place though in Unity and the entire character is bobbing up and down slightly. The animation looks wrong right upon import. The same animation works perfectly fine in Unreal though, so there seems to be a difference in how Unity prefers its animations?
I’ve attached a gif to showcase the problem (the end is Unreal, that’s how it’s supposed to look like).

The character itself can play animations correctly. I’ve tried retargeting dance animations from mixamo in Maya to my character and importing them, they work fine. So the problem is with the animation itself I think.

I’ve tried soo many things, for example:

  • Switching animation types, humanoid, generic, etc. → no effect
  • retargeting the animation to a different skeleton in Maya (e.g. Mixamo) → same issue
  • enabling and disabling root motion in the animator component of the character → no significant change
  • changing the root node in the character’s import settings → only makes it worse

Does anyone have any pointers what Unity asks of animations in order to look correct?
Would appreciate any help… really…

9882819--1425798--TalkingAnimationIssue.gif

2

I solved it. (kinda)
The problem is the animation compression setting in the Animation import settings which is set to keyframe reduction by default. Turning it off makes the animation look as intended, but is notably heavier on the system and causes some lagging unfortunately.
Leaves the question, how other animations from mixamo for example don’t have the swaying issue even with keyframe reduction on and they were baked when exporting too (aka 1 key for each bone each frame).
I still find it interesting that Unreal doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.
So now I have to look into ways to make animations less heavy. Usually animations are baked when exporting though, no? Especially when working with Motion Capture.

Any tips on that maybe?

3

Most likely cause is disabled Root Motion in character animator. The animation might be having hip movement. When you disable root motion, entire character will move. Try enabling the root motion and see if the animation works fine.

4

Hi, thanks for your reply!
I’ve tried enabling and disabling root motion, it does not make a significant difference. I left it enabled and the issue persisted. I solved the issue by turning off any animation compression in the animation file import settings. That works, gives Unity a lot more to compute though unfortunately.