How to Fix Imported Animation Playing Too Fast or Slow from an Import Scale Mismatch

When a character's feet slide or a run looks too fast, the animation's translation may have been scaled differently from the mesh. Root and bone translation keys are in the same units as the model, so a scale applied to one but not the other breaks stride-to-distance matching.

How to fix it

1. Scale mesh and animation together

Apply object scale in your DCC tool before export so a single 1:1 export covers both geometry and motion. Mismatched scale between them is the root of speed and sliding errors.

2. Use scale-compensated import

If you must scale on import, use the importer option that scales animation translation alongside the mesh, so stride length stays proportional to the model size.

3. Verify stride against capsule speed

Play the clip in-engine and compare foot travel to the intended movement speed. If feet slide, the displacement scale still does not match the world unit size.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.