Animator & Timeline peculiarities

Hi,

I’m having trouble getting my character Animators and Timeline playing nicely with one another. What I’m looking to do is have the Animator overriden by the Timeline while the Timeline is playing, but then to blend back out to whatever the Animator state is (in my case an Idle animation). For the most part this works but not always!

For instance for my character ‘Snapper’ I would expect to play the Animator (idle), blend into the ‘Snapper_Listening’ clip, and then blend back out to the Animator:

However, on different enter Play Mode the results are different. Sometimes it works and Snapper blends from the Idle state in the Animator to the Listening animation from the Timeline and then back again. However, sometimes Snapper will be in the default Mecanim pose, blend into Listening then back into the default Mecanim pose, almost like the Animator is completely ignored? If I duplicate the Snapper character in the scene while the game is running, the Animator plays as you would expect.

This feels like a Unity bug?

Thanks