UI button animation tied to state rather than transition

Unity Engine
1

I am pretty much a newbie when it comes to the new GUI, so I am currently stuck with one principal thing: I created a button animation that should slide a button almost completely off the screen when it is disabled, just leaving a glimpse of it visible.
That’s all good for the animation tied to the disabled state: the button slides smoothly off screen according to my animation curve. But I have an issue with sliding it back in the same way reversed. First of all, I would have expected the animation being tied to a transition, not to the state. The slide back animation should only occur on transitioning from disabled to normal, but not e.g. from pressed to normal. With a reverse animation tied to normal state, however, it would also apply the slide back just because it returns from pressed to normal, which is of course not desired. But for the life of me I can’t find how to attach animations to the transition rather than to the state.
The second issue: even if I accept the animation to be attached to a state, how can I easily get the exact reverse behavior of the slide out? Even if I duplicate the other animation and somehow reverse it’s behavior exactly, it doesn’t feel right this way. Whenever I change the one part slightly, I need to rework the other as well. I tried to attach the slide out animation and check the “mirror” flag, but this did nothing. I believe the back and forth animation is something so “standard” that there is probably a better and easier way to do it, and I just missed to find it…

Maybe I just didn’t get it right. I read and viewed tons of tutorials, but somehow couldn’t really find an answer here. So hopefully someone can push me to the right direction?

2

I think I see what you are saying. Check out @Will-Goldstone 's UI video tutorial and see if that helps, he walks through a lot of the animation features (and explains it very well) for the new UI.
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/06/30/unity-4-6-new-ui-world-space-canvas/

3

I think there’s a principal drawback here. The animation system used for the GUI had initially a different use case: the focus was on animating states for in-game objects. They are “running”, “ducking”, “idling” etc., and such states have a constant, mostly looping animation tied to them. Transitioning from one state to the other is a neglectable transformation between different applied animations, and if required you can use blend trees.
For a GUI, though, I believe it’s different. A GUI is mostly static in it’s stable states, and transformation animations occur on state changes. So what is really missing (and would probably be a small thing to add for Unity) is attaching additionally an animation to the transition itself. It would be played when a transition is fired.
I worked around this now by introducing an artificial “enabling” state and attached the disabling animation with a reverse speed of “-1” to it. It then instantly transitions unconditionally further to the “normal” state. To make it work, you need to make all transitions to “normal” state explicit and can’t simply have “any state” point to “normal” on the “Normal” trigger. But now I have a nice disabling animation that’s properly reversed automatically on re-enabling the button (and w/o affecting the other behaviors for highlighting or pressing).

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Regards, habitoti