PLEASE Help with Animation v. Animator!

Questions & Answers
1

I created and animated a character in 3ds Max (which I have worked in since release 1 for DOS over 20 years.)
Having followed tutorials and Documentation I have gotten this far:

Success’s:

  1. My character is now in Unity, I added an Animation component with a size of 27 elements and associated the slots with my 27 clips. It has (one of) my Idle clips as the top pick. (this plays in the Game window predictably.)
  2. I created an Animator Controller called: ALIEN, dragged in my 3 idle clips (to start with…) and created Transitions from Entry---->Idle1---->Idle2---->Idle3
  3. I added an Animator Component to the character (in addition to the Animation and Character Components). I then associated to the ALIEN Animator Controller. Do I UNCHECK Apply Root Motion?

Problems:

  1. When I hit ‘Play’ the Character only plays the first IDLE animation from ‘Animation’ component.
  2. I have no AVATAR, I never did find out what they mean by that, they just show some green bones and say: ‘now Make your avatar’
  3. I don’t know what the ‘ANY STATE’ entry in the Animator Controller Flow chart is for or what to do with it, it sits alone (not mentioned in any tutorial I have found yet).

Help with those things would be gret, how to get the Character to listen to this Animator Controller Flow Chart,… How to make an Avatar, How or if to use ‘ANY STATE’.

I would also love to know how to:

  1. just tell the character: While paying attention to the ground, hills and not walking through walls, run through these clips in order: Walk, Walk, Walk, Jump, Run, Spin in air, Back Flip, Dance (that’s what I THOUGHT I was doing in the Animator Controller!!!)

  2. How to click the Forward Thumbstick on a Oculus touch controller and the character plays through the WALK clip, push it in (or press Trigger) and he plays the RUN clip, Press the grip and he plays the ‘reach out and grab’ clip, click button A and he plays the JUMP clip … ETC.

This used to be so simple to do…
Thank you!

2

It seems you should have read the documentation more carefully. On the AnimationOverview manual page you can see a rough introduction of the Mecanim animation system. At the bottom of the page they mention the legacy animation system. The Animator component belongs to the “new” statemachine based animation system called mecanim while the Animation component belongs to the legacy animation system.

Of course you never want to add both components to the same object.
Both are meant to play animations and to control of the object they are attached to. So of course they would interfere with each other.

You packed too many questions into one. It seems you try to rush things a bit too fast. You should take your time to actually understand the different parts.

When you import a model Unity usually creates an avatar for the model which will be a sub asset under the imported model.If not check the “Rig” section of the model importer. The Avatar is basically a bone mapping configuration.

In a statemachine you have states and transitions between states. The transitions are controlled by variables / triggers / conditions. The “AnyState” is a special state which, as the name said, represents any state. So transitions from Anystate to another state can happen no matter which state is active. This simplifies setting up certain transitions. If AnyState didn’t exist and you want a transition from “any state” to a particular state you would need many seperate transitions instead of one.

It’s really hard to tell at what exact point you’re stuck or what you want to achieve. If the concept of a state machine is too complicated for you, you can still use the legacy Animation component. With it you can simply play one of the clips from a script.

I don’t have an oculus rift or it’s touch controller so i can’t really help you on the last question. Though i guess it might just register itself as generic joystick so you have to figure out which axis is which.