Custom animator controller is animating wrong. What Unity magic did you guys do for the Demo controller?

I'm having some...issues with my animations and controller. All three are the same rig, playing the same animation, with the same avatar:

AnimationsScrewy.gif
  • The one on the far right is a blank model with nothing but my custom animator controller.
  • The one in the middle is the same prefab but with all the Ultimate Character Controller components set up by the Character Manager, still using my custom animator controller.
  • And the one on the far left is a duplicate of the one in the middle, but using the provided demo animator controller (with the Idle animation replaced with the one I'm using)
Needless to say, the one on the far left is the animation behavior I'm looking for. The only difference I can see is that I didn't use a blend tree in my animation controller (for the idle animation). I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what I'm doing wrong. (I'm posting here instead of a general Unity forum because clearly the Character Controller is doing SOMETHING, and your controller is the only thing behaving correctly).
 
There isn't anything special setup about the animator. Do you have the character ik component?
 
If you disable that then it will play the animations exact as they are without any limb placement. I would try doing that to see if that's what it is.
 
I did some more research, changed around my search terms, and eventually I found the issue.
In the animator, on the base layer (or any layer with IK animations), I had to have IK Pass checked. Once I did that my animations stayed anchored to the ground correctly. Still don't understand why the Character Controller was making it worse, but this seems to have fixed everything. Sorry for the bother.
 
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