Mecanim ignoring animation poses.

More Mecanim woes I'm afriad. I'm still struggling with getting my 3ds max biped animations to be accurately portrayed by Unity.

Very basic biped setup - only things I've changed are number of spine bones (changed from 4 to 2). I make a basic animation where - at frame 0 the character is in a crouch using planted keys to keep his feet in position. I then move hsi centre of gravity upwards and back down.

I export an FBX, include animation, bake animation and include the relevant frames.

Import to unity, change to a humanoid in the import settings, create new avatar from this. In the avatar settings I set the hips to the Biped's root node, the spine to the first spine bone and the chest to the second spine bone.

When I go to the animations tab and inspect the preview I see the Unity default character is stood not quite as far down as my biped is at frame 0 (noticably so) and when he moves upwards his legs extend fully, WHILST HIS WHOLE BODY ALSO MOVES UP A BIT(that makes no sense to me because there's also some kind of IK still going on, so why would his feet move mid-IK?), then he goes back down to his half-crouch. this happens no matter what kind of animation I import. Even a static pose ends up with him standing straighter than he was in Max resulting in all my characters looking rigid.

Has nobody else found this? I'm not exactly new to this so I'm amazed such a simple process ends up with broken results...

Is this a max biped compatability issue? Is it because I set the biped root to the pelvis? This is becoming a huge problem sadly.

This is a shot of the two examples. Notice the lack of accuracy in the Unity guy compared to the max biped. The max biped root was set to 0,0,0 in this case hence why his legs are below the origin, but this makes no difference as I have found exactly the same problem occurs when the biped is stood ON the origin plane as he does by default once created.