I was able to fix this problem; my root motion constraint in the animation was not following the rotations.
I tried implementing motion matching.
I finished making 8 start-to-walk animations with 8 walk loop animations for 8 directions and 1 idle animation. I tried motion matching for the first time; I followed some well-known tutorials for motion matching and ended up with this. It sees the directions correctly, but it is stuck—it plays a few frames of the animations over and over again. I don’t know how to debug this. The default “Continuing Pose Cost Bias” was set to “-0.01”. I tried “-0.5”; some minimal changes happened, but the problem persists.
Edit: Just used the Rewind Debugger tool and noticed it doesn’t play walk loop animations at all; it is stuck at playing the start-to-walk animations only.
Unreal engine:
Example of how it looks (in the animation software) from idle to start-to-walk to walk loop: