Best way to handle looking up and down? Mechanim and poses or code?

We’re trying to set up the player and entities can look up and down. I tried using masks on just the spine and head and an additive layer but it didn’t seem to do anything at all. Using an overlay on the upper body layer seems to work, but the spine influences my weapon holding upper body rotations so the player is holding the weapon off to the side now.

Do I need to make a look up and down for every weapon hold animation?

And using code it seems to water down my firing animations so they do not have a proper strength or weight.

I’ve been modifying bones rotation in LateUpdate() but it doesn’t work, it jitter like crazy in a frame rate dependent manner and mess up the physics.

Additive layer should work as long as you don’t use root motion.

Oh I always use root motion. I managed to have some success using an overlay for look up and down.

The biggest problem I seem to have is figuring out the best way to handle weapon holding and moving forward, and how to do looking up and down without overtaking the spine. I have my idle, walk and run on the base layer with no mask. I had to put my arms in an “arms only mask” layer so that when I run and walk the spine keeps animated how it is supposed to. The drawback to this method is all your weapon holds have to use the same idle pose on the torso which doesn’t look that great having to compromise a pistol hold stance for a big two handed weapon stance.