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Quality Score

A single dashboard summarizing how production-ready your animation is — at a glance, like an Apple Watch fitness ring.

Tier: Builder Pro Menu: Physics → 📊 Quality Score

What it does​

Animation quality is hard to eyeball. A clip that "looks fine" can have invisible foot sliding, subtle joint hyperextension, asymmetric balance, or non-smooth interpolation that makes it feel "off" without being able to point at why.

Quality Score samples your animation across the timeline and produces a single composite score plus per-metric breakdowns. The headline visualization is an Apple-Watch-style ring dashboard — three concentric rings filling toward 100% as your animation gets healthier.

The four scored metrics:

MetricTargets
SmoothnessMinimal acceleration spikes, no jitter
Joint LimitsNo bone hyperextended past anatomical bounds
Foot LockingNo foot sliding when a foot is grounded
BalanceCenter of Mass stays over the support polygon (avatar isn't falling)

Each metric gives a percentage. The overall Quality Score is a weighted average tuned to match how a senior animator would rate the clip subjectively.

How it samples​

Quality Score uses a sample-on-demand pattern — it doesn't need pre-baked metric data, it doesn't need explicit keyframes at every frame. When you open the panel:

  1. The current animation is sampled across all frames using a clone of the live mixer (the mixer's actual state is untouched, so playback isn't affected).
  2. Per-frame measurements are taken: bone world positions, velocities, joint angles, foot heights, CoM position vs. support polygon.
  3. Metrics are aggregated and the rings fill in real time.

Total time: typically <200ms for a 60-frame clip on a typical humanoid rig. You see the result almost instantly.

Kinetiq Engine Quality Score panel — large central ring showing 80/100 with the label Production Ready, four smaller metric rings (Smooth 100, Foot 100, Loop 100, Joint 8 in red, CoM 90), and action buttons Clamp Joint Violations, Re-analyze, and Fix All. The avatar in the viewport shows skeleton bones overlaid

The Quality Score dashboard. The big ring is the composite score; the four small rings break down each metric. In this clip everything looks great except Joint Limits — a single red ring tells you instantly where the artifact is. Click Fix All to apply smoothing + loop blend + foot lock in one pass, or Clamp Joint Violations to handle just that metric.

The sample is isolated — running Quality Score never disturbs whatever else you're doing. You can open it mid-edit and close it without losing state.

Reading the rings​

Each ring fills clockwise from 12 o'clock:

    100%
     ▲
0%   │   25%
◄────┼────►
     │
   Empty
  • Empty / partial fill (red zone, ~0-40%): the metric is failing — there are clear quality issues that an audience would notice.
  • Half full (amber zone, ~40-70%): borderline. Intermediate quality. A pro animator would polish further; a casual viewer might miss the issues.
  • Almost full (green zone, ~70-95%): production quality. Send-to-client material.
  • Full ring (100%): mathematically clean. Often unrealistic for organic motion (real animation has natural micro-imperfections).

Hovering each ring surfaces the actual numbers — e.g. "Smoothness: 87% — peak acceleration 2.3 u/s² at frame 14".

Per-metric drill-down​

Click any ring to drill into that metric's report.

Smoothness Report​

Lists the frames with the highest acceleration spikes. Each entry shows the bone, frame, peak acceleration value, and a "go to frame" link that scrubs the timeline. Useful for catching tweens that aren't smoothing properly (often a quick Bezier or Squad interpolation switch fixes it).

Joint Limits Report (also in Physics menu directly)​

Lists every bone that hyperextended (rotated past anatomical limits) sorted by frequency. Each entry shows the bone, the count of frames it was over-extended, and the worst-frame angle. Can be reached directly via Physics → Joint Limits Report. See the Joint Limits page for the dedicated workflow.

Foot Locking Report​

Lists the foot bones, total grounded frames, and the skating distance — how much each foot drifted across the floor while it should have been planted. Skating greater than ~0.05 units per grounded frame is visible to the viewer. See the Foot Locking page for the live correction tool.

Balance Report​

Lists frames where the avatar's Center of Mass drifted outside the support polygon (the convex hull of foot contact points). Avatars in mid-air are exempt. See the Center of Mass page for live visualization.

When to run it​

  • Right after import — see how the source clip rates before you touch it.
  • After Mirror or Loop Fixer — confirm the polish operation didn't introduce new artifacts.
  • Before export — final pre-flight check. If all rings are green, you're shipping production-grade.
  • As a teaching tool — for new animators, the rings make abstract motion-quality concepts concrete.

Workflow — "from 60% to 95%" tightening​

  1. Import your animation.
  2. Open Quality Score. Note the overall percentage and which rings lag.
  3. Worst ring is, say, Foot Locking 45%. Open Physics → Foot Locking, tune the threshold, watch the skating drop.
  4. Re-run Quality Score. Foot Locking ring now reads 88%. Balance ring slipped slightly because foot lock changed CoM trajectory — that's expected.
  5. Address the next-worst ring (probably Smoothness). Check the spike report, switch quaternion interpolation on the offending tracks.
  6. Re-run. Iterate until all rings are green.

This gradual-tightening loop is the reason Quality Score exists — it makes "polishing an animation" feel like leveling up a stat, not a vague art exercise.

Edge cases​

No animation loaded​

If clipData is null and there's no legacy mixer, the rings stay at 0% with a banner explaining no data. Same as other Polish/Physics tools — no crash.

Very short clips (under ~5 frames)​

Some metrics (especially smoothness) need a window to compute. Clips under ~5 frames fall back to "insufficient data" with a hint to add more keyframes.

Static poses​

If every track has only one keyframe (a static pose with no motion), Smoothness defaults to 100% (nothing to be jerky), Foot Locking defaults based on whether feet touch ground in the static pose, Joint Limits checks the single frame, Balance checks CoM at that frame.

Sample-on-demand cost on huge rigs​

Rigs with 200+ bones and clips with 600+ frames push sample time toward ~1 second. The UI shows a brief spinner; not blocking.

  • Foot Locking — the live correction tool that pulls Foot Lock score up
  • Joint Limits — diagnostic report for hyperextension
  • Center of Mass — Balance metric's live visualization counterpart
  • Mirror Animation — run Quality Score after mirror to confirm no new artifacts
  • Loop Fixer — Quality Score will spot any seam-induced spikes