Animation override procedural animation

I have a control that is used to procedurally rotate the bone corresponding to the torso of a character. I call the procedural rotation function in LateUpdate.

When I test the scene, if the animation is turned off, everything works great. If I turn the animation on then it feels like the procedural animation is fighting the regular animation.

What happens is the torso turns a little bit jitters like it's trying to snap back to the standard idle animation. It feels like the scene is trying to render update then render LateUpdate rather than letting the LateUpdate procedural animation override the regular animation.

Any idea what's happening here or how I can address the issue?

Thanks for your help!

If you are playing an animation that is controlling a bone then that animation will be applied every frame after Update and before LateUpdate.

If your LateUpdate overwrites the bone alignment in an absolute way, there should be no "fighting" - the result of the LateUpdate procedural animation is what will be rendered.

However, if your LateUpdate performs some relative adjustements, like Lerping or Slerping from the current alignment to something else, then the "current alignemnt" will keep being overwritten in Update, so the starting point that LateUpdate is working from will be what was set in Update, not what was set in the LateUpdate of the previous frame. This is expected behaviour.

So if you want your LateUpdate to have complete control, you should either make it set the alignment in an absolute way that doesn't depend on the previous alignment, or you should just not play an animation that controls the same bone(s).