I am importing armature animations into Unity3D from Blender; I have managed to pick up from here and there (I can’t believe no definitive central resource exists for this) that you create separate action strips in the NLA editor for each action, one after the other, and the name of each action can be used to reference it in Unity3D. That works fine.
I even figured out that you should not make the last frame of the previous animation and the first frame of the next on the same, to avoid later complications. Is this alright?
Now, frame 1 of the animation moves the model’s hands next to his side. When the model was modelled and unrigged, he had is hands spread out.
When I import the animations into Unity3D, instead of showing the model at the first frame of the animation, it shows the model in its unrigged ‘hands spread out’ pose rather than at the first ‘hands by side’ frame.
You don’t need to use the NLA editor at all. Just make a separate action for each animation and the import should work perfectly with each action automatically separated for you.
It is not an unrigged pose, it is rather the inanimate pose for the skeleton, the editable pose. But once you play the scene, you will find it starts the default animation you assign at the editor or by script. Think also that if you want to attack any prop or weapon to your model hands, this default position will be very useful for you to get the default location for the bone you want as a parent.
Sure, I know it starts the default animation I assign, but it transitions from the editable pose (as you call it) to the first frame of the animation at the beginning of the game. I don’t want that to happen.
So I should just put up a blank screen when the game first loads or something to wait for the ‘editable pose’ to transition into the first frame of the animation?