How do i make a two-character (interacting) animation?

Hello everyone. I’m quite new here…I just joined unity answers yesterday, so apologies if i sound unclear or vague.

Making a ‘punch’ animation doesn’t require that you focus on any other character other than the one you’re animating. All you have to do is make the ‘punch’ animation in the modeling software, and in the engine, you check for collisions and the receiver of the punch plays the ‘hurt’ animation. But when you decide to implement a Throw attack where the character grabs the enemy and flings him over his shoulders, two animations will have to play at the same time.

Let’s take for example a wrestling game. The player presses some keys and the main character grabs the enemy. The main character and the enemy play the ‘grapple’ animation at the same time. That is quiet easy because both animations are alike, but if, during the grapple, the player presses some other keys and the main character performs a slam (say, Undertakers’ PileDriver Finisher), the main character plays an animation and the opponent plays an entirely different animation, how do we make both animation synch properly (keyframe by keyframe), giving the impression that the main character is holding the opponent and slamming him.

If I make the two animations in different files, (e.g undertaker.blend and opponent.blend) it would be impossible to know how and where each frame should be because ‘opponent’ is not in the undertaker.blend file and vice versa. So how do i go about this?? Thanks a lot in advance.

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well both animations just need to be played at the same time (one grappling, the other grapped) to achieve the ‘sync’, and while they are doing the animations, disable controls to play other animations.

For advanced stuff, like different sized characters with different body shapes/morphs you need full body IK. Take a look at Final IK from the asset store, it has a similar example where two characters shake hands with procedural animation.