aimoffset is moving my mesh

okay im in to day 3 of this and it is driving me absolutely nuts.

the blending in my aimoffset is moving my mesh up and down and i’ve tried everything i can think of. i have no idea what would even cause this.

i’ve even dumbed it down to just centre-up, centre, and centre-down with just pitch and it’s still doing it

the blending is set to mesh space. all 3 of the animations being used have these settings.
Screenshot 2024-09-24 094427

the aimoffset blendspace itself looks like this. everything else is default.

the end result is that the mesh moves up and down while inbetween the animation states. if i set it to the top the mesh is correct, centre it’s correct, bottom it’s correct but while blending between the three it moves up and down.

i’ve spent three days trying to figure out why it’s doing this.

any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated. i truly am stuck. :v: