Undivided /
They ran sideways.
Four hundred soldiers facing ninety degrees off their direction of travel, and one root component to blame.
The Manny skeletal mesh wants a minus ninety degree yaw to face forward. When that mesh was also the actor's root, the crowd system wrote the entity's heading straight over it every frame, and the offset vanished. Everyone jogged with perfect conviction, sideways.
The fix is boring and permanent: a plain scene component is the root, the mesh hangs off it with its own yaw, and the heading is applied to the root only. Measured afterwards, the fast movers face within about two degrees of their velocity.
The same pass replaced our hand-picked jog loop with the mannequin's own idle-walk-run blend space, driven by direction and speed. It looked better in one afternoon than anything we had tuned by hand, which is the argument for stock animation in one sentence.