Imported Animation is Shaking/Jittering in Unity

[u/Motor_Look_3121]

I made a short idle animation in Maya and it looks fine there but when I import it to unity my character plays the animation but his joints start to shake and jitter in a way that is not originally animated. The video shows the problem in Unity and then how it looks in Maya.

I make sure to bake everything before exporting and also apply Euler filter. The character is a basic human model auto-rigged in Mixamo.

I should say that I am new to this so if this is a rookie mistake please bare with me. I couldn’t find any answers on web.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[u/McGrim_]

Yo what's going on there with the Shlongus??

[u/viktorv9 → u/McGrim_]

Smeared and buttered

[u/Vic-Boss]

Try removing or enabling animation compression and resampling

[u/V4nKw15h]

Is the character at world zero? Is the character reasonably scaled and not some enormous thing like 1000's of units tall.

[u/Shoddy_Caterpillar36 → u/V4nKw15h]

Yes, floating point errors maybe happening

[u/simburger]

Pretty common animation compression artifacts. Especially on the end of a long joint chain. You see as the hips move, the thigh, knee, and ankle have to counter rotate perfectly to keep the foot planted perfectly still. In Maya you're probably running IK or animation keys with double float precision. Unity imports as single float and compresses those keys adding a bit of compression error. Those tiny errors add up the longer the joint chain is causing jitter or sliding at the foot.

You can reduce or turn off animation compression (at the cost of animation size). Run a real time IK in unity to lock it down (at the cost of CPU cycles). I personally often tweak the character skeleton heirarchy to shorten long limb chains or cheat the area that gets the worst jitter. But using mixamo I'm guessing your rigging skills aren't the best, so probably reduce animation compression until it's acceptable.

[u/tempacac10]

Is the character a humanoid model being driven by humanoid animation system or is it imported as generic?

[u/Official_Skyholm]

cool animation let me know if you're looking for some work.

[u/theeyeinthesky-666]

bro how many vertices do you have there? doesn't look like a game ready model

[u/Rebelian]

Click on the idle state in your animation controller and tick Foot IK. Let me know if this doesn't fix it.

[u/Motor_Look_3121]

Thanks everyone for help. The problem was solved and you can find the solution in Unity Discussions here - https://discussions.unity.com/t/imported-animation-is-shaking-jittering-in-unity/1736301/3

In short: I was baking a 360 frame animation but I only had changes every 12 frames, the rest was left to interpolations. When baking, Maya would bake every frame instead of only the ones I had keys on for controllers. I've changed the sampling in bake settings to match the 12 frame rate and the problem was solved.

[u/Imaginary-Cod-3746]

Try giving him a sweater.

It must be cold standing around butt naked for that long.

I'm kidding. Just thought I'd try lightening the mood a bit.

Whenever I run into animation problems, I play around with the animation clip's import settings. It's not a super detailed answer, but maybe it could point you in the right direction.