Settings for animations of stops after walks in motion matching

Development Character & Animation
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1

I can’t figure out how to adjust stops animations in motion matching.
There are only 4 walk loops and 4 stop animations due to budget limitations.
I have chooser with rules, I have PSD for walk loops and PSD for stops, I have Pose Search Schema that I try to use on PSD for stops.
There are also Foot Placement in the animBP.

The result is: the character walks, then at the stop moment his feet jitter for a second or two before animation switches to Idle.

I tried to exclude FootPlacement, adjust weights in Schema and I don’t see any changes.

Rewind debugger shows that at the stop moment motion matching tries every stop animation one after one.

Should I simply have more animations for PSD? Or there are settings I tweaked wrong?

All the tutorials use default settings to show the general idea of motion matching and don’t cover my question, ai recommends to adjust weights and it didn’t help.

2

Reading your rewind debugger result (it cycles through every stop clip one after another), the stop database is probably being searched every frame while the character is still decelerating, so the best match keeps flipping before it settles on Idle.

Things I’d try:

  • Only enable the stop DB when the trajectory says you’re actually stopping (predicted future speed near 0 / input released), and make the Chooser fall back to Idle afterwards instead of staying in the stop DB.
  • On the Motion Matching node, raise the search throttle time and give the continuing pose a lower cost bias, so once a stop clip is picked it isn’t replaced every frame.
  • Raise the blend time on the transition into Idle, and check that the stop DB isn’t using the same Schema weights as locomotion: weight the Trajectory channel (future positions) more than the pose channel for stops.
  • The jitter is also commonly Foot Placement fighting the stop animation: bypass it with an alpha driven by “is in stop DB” for those frames instead of removing the node entirely.

With only 4 stops, mirroring them in the database (Mirror option) gives you effectively 8 for free, which often fixes the foot-order problem.