Unity Animation Blending Unintended Rotations with Upper Body Animations

I’m working with Unity’s Humanoid Avatar and trying to blend upper body animations (like punching or holding a gun) onto lower body animations (like running). However, I’m experiencing issues where the upper body animations cause unintended rotations due to the root bone, leading to awkward positioning ( instead of a punch being aimed forward its aimed sideways or skew) .

  • I tried making the hip/root bone static for both the running and upper body animations, but this resulted in a static and unattractive look.
  • I considered rigging adjustments in Blender and experimented with a static “ghost bone” as the root. While this helped, it made the lower body control dependent on the “Body” section of the avatar mask, causing the lower body to rotate incorrectly when applying upper body animations.
  • In a last-ditch attempt, I cut the mesh and armature in half and imported them separately, but this approach feels overly complicated.

I’m at a loss here. Is there a better way to manage this rigging issue ( I am using a mixamo Rig and have tried custom ones) , or would switching to a generic rig be more effective? Should I be manually correcting rotations via code, or is there a way to utilize IK that doesn’t involve applying it to every animation?

Has anyone else faced this problem? Any advice or resources would be greatly appreciated, as I’ve struggled to find helpful solutions from popular tutorials and forum posts. I am getting desperate please help thank you

Well upon further testing, it seems generic rigs make it very possible and you can at least choose which part of the bone chain ( Hips, Spine1, Spine2 etc ) you want to have with zero rotations. Its still very frustrating because it feels like its still doable with a humanoid rig and I’m missing something important.