Semantics of calling Animation.Play before previous animation has finished playing.

Questions & Answers
1

I hope I can explain this - I asked this question before but it was rejected because supposedly it wasn’t a technical question. I believe it is though…
I noticed something I don’t quite understand with animations… Following the book Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials I’m working with a target model that has an “up” and “down” animation in addition to “idle”.
“up” moves the target all the way up while “down” moves it down.
Now if the “up” animation is playing - if I Play(“down”) again when the target is only halfway up the “down” animation starts from this point, not from the start. Actually this is the desired effect but I fail to see why it doesn’t start the “down” animation from the beginning? Does Unity somehow find the closest animation frame to the current state of the mesh and start from there? According to the API:

Play() will start animation with name animation, or play the default animation. The animation will be played abruptly without any blending.

2

Legacy animations works as you suspect. Playing a new one will immediately snap to the first frame of that animation, with zero regard for any previous animation. As if it had never been played.

CrossFade is the same way. It blends the old and new for a few frames. But once those frames end you’ll be in the exact position as if you used Play (like when you talk to someone, stepping away slowly, then rush to where you’d be if you hadn’t talked, then resume walking normally.)

But, are you using the new Mechanim animation system? Not sure if that was around for 3.x. Mechanim does have a lot of special things it does for you, I think some about adding root-bone motion to your real position.