What's the best way to set up an animator controller for a character that can look up, down, or sideways?

Hello,

I’m a newbie here, so I’m going to apologize up front if this q is dumb.

I have a character I’m trying to animate (2D). It has three basic states: idle, walk, and jump. My problem is, it can also be facing up, down, or sideways – boosting the total number of states to 9, all with a lot of different transitions. Is there a way to manage this properly? Because I feel like creating nine separate states and managing the transitions is not super viable, especially if I want to add other actions.

@TaylorAnderson

A blend tree is what you need , they are covered in this series