Difference between single animation track and many for same Animator?

We’re exploring Timeline this week and I’m trying to basically just move objects around in the scene. I have a hierarchy of objects, a wrapper with an Animator, and individual animation files to move sub objects.

- Wrapper Object (Animator)
---- Box 1
---- Box 2
---- Box 3
---- Box 4

My animations are something like this

- Move_Box1_ToPosition
- Move_Box2_ToPosition
- Move_Box3_ToPosition
- Move_Box4_ToPosition

I’ve disabled Write Defaults in all of the Animator States as I don’t want to reset the entire transform hierarchy of everything under the Animator when playing an animation.

However it appears when I use a single animation track and do those animations back to back then there are some issues with resetting when it moves into the next animation.

When I use one animation track per each animation then the objects play their animation and move through the timeline as expected, not resetting.

My question is why is this happening? Additionally, is there any significant performance impact to having ~50 Animation Tracks?

Ok so this seems limited to the Editor. I’m basically just seeing different results when not in play mode. Likely related to my other post about scrubbing .

It seems to be correct in Play mode.

In editor mode, you will see the effect of the last animation track.

In playmode, you will see them layer correctly.

Alternatively you can use overrride tracks on a single animation tracks, which will preview correctly in both play and edit modes. This is also slightly more efficient than using multiple animation tracks - the animator will see it as a single graph, where as multiple animation tracks will be presented to the animation as multiple graphs that need to be blended.

Thanks for the information @seant_unity - sorry for my frustration on these two threads >_<