Working with Animator Layers and trying to get both to play at once

Unity Engine
1

Let me start by saying I’m BRAND NEW to animations and fairly new to Unity in general. I’ve read all of the animation documentation and I think I’m heading in the right direction… I’m just hitting a snag that I can’t seem to figure out.

Basically, I have 1 animation controller which controls my hero animations. I want to be able to play animations in his right hand and be able to play completely separate animations in his left hand. Sometimes just the right will play, sometimes the left, and sometimes they will both play simultaneously. The way I understand it I need to use layers. So, I’ve set up 2 layers (Right and Left), and I’ve added states for right punch and left punch. The transition is basically if rightHandPunch is true step to the right punch state. The same setup goes for the left punch. Now, what happens when I play the game is if I set rightHandPunch to true he punches right (good) and if I set leftHandPunch to true he punches left (good again). However, if I set both variables to true at once he does not throw both animation punches at once, the state machine seems to pick right or left but not both. I’m sure I am missing something simple, any help is appreciated.

Also, if I delete or rename a state in one layer it gets deleted/renamed in the other layer. Is that supposed to happen?

While I’m asking questions - After an animation completes how do you get the state to revert back to Idle automatically? I’m sure it’s part of the transition but I don’t see an option for animation completing. I read in another post that you have to set an exit time, but that didn’t seem to do anything.

Lots of help needed - Thanks for looking.

2

Ok, I solved the issue with both animations not playing at the same time. The animations are going crazy and my guy looks like a lunatic but both animations ARE playing in the correct states. I’ll have to go back to the drawing board on how my animations are made to fix the problem I think.

I still can’t get my animations to revert to Idle though. I’ve read several articles now and it looks like I need to take advantage of the Trigger parameter type… but I haven’t figured that out yet.

Edit: This is all the information I can find on Trigger in the Unity documentation: “Trigger - a boolean parameter that is reset by the controller when consumed by a transition (represented by a circle button)”.