Cannot figure out how to use the Animator!

I’ve looked at so many threads on here and looked up tutorials and videos. I just cannot seem to wrap my head around it and don’t understand how to get what I want. I’ve spent about four days now just trying to figure out how to do anything.

I’m trying to make a spaceship warp out by simply scaling down it’s size, changing it’s position in the game window and then warp back in by scaling up it’s size again. This is supposed to happen when you hit a certain key. I can do the changing position. That’s simple. It’s wonky as hell, but it works.

But I just have no idea how the Animator works. I can’t even get the animation of the ship scaling down working, let alone have it change position and then scale back up. I’m not sure how I have to set up the states and at the moment have an Idle, WarpOut, an empty state called ChangePosition where I guess the position would change and then WarpIn. I’m not sure how to transition between them. WarpOut and WarpIn have a motion that has an animation changing the scale.

I really need help with this. Even pointing me to some super basic beginners text tutorial on the subject would be helpful because the manual goes over my head and any video tutorials make it look super easy and make me feel super dumb that I can’t figure it out.

I know it’s annoying to learn. Recently I finally took the time to research how it works… so happy I did.

Have a look at this tutorial… you shouldn’t be using animator unless you already have animations. I had issues when i first learnt aswell… But i feel that these tutorials dumb it down alot making so much easier… official unity tutorials as usually way to fast and talk about mumbo jumbo without giving context.

How to Create and Play an Animation in Unity 5 - YouTube

After you have an animation you will get an animator controller which the animator is used for.