Animations not accepted in animator

Question

In the official Unity Animator State Machine tutorial video animation clips are dragged out from the assets folder into the animator and dropped.

I have a 3D model that i bought online to experiment with that comes with animations. I added a custom made animation as well. These all work well in my demo project. But when i add a animator to the assets and try to drag and drop animations onto it it doesnt work. I get a forbidden-sign as a mouse pointer. I try to add animations through the inspector but that does not work either.

The tutorials makes it seem so easy and does not talk anything about what animations can be used. What am i doing wrong?

Answer 1

Ok this can be a bit daunting but i'll run you through it. With the animator component you need to use the animator tab and switch between the different states via blend trees etc. Animator tab is here

You create an Idle state and assign your idle animation as shown here:

Now all you need to do is tell Mecanim to move between the difference states depending on what you're doing, in my controller script thats attached to my character when I press Forward or backward (Vertical axis 1 or -1) my code does the following(cut down for clarity):

Note where I do anim.SetBool() that sets the variables you define in the animator which tell mecanim when to switch between the animations.

void Start() {
  // Get the animator associated with this character
  myAnimator = transform.GetComponent<Animator>();

}

void Update() {
  // Lots of other stuff

  if(Input.GetAxis("Vertical")>0){ // Forward
    transform.position += transform.forward * speed;
        anim.SetBool ("isWalking", true);
  }

  if(Input.GetAxis("Vertical")<0){ // Backward
    transform.position += -transform.forward * speed;
        anim.SetBool ("isWalkingBack", true);
  }

  if(Input.GetAxis("Vertical")==0){
        // We're neither walking forward or back so stop animating.

        anim.SetBool ("isWalkingBack", false);
        anim.SetBool ("isWalking", false);
  }



}

There's a tutorial here from Unity themselves.

Trust me I really feel your pain with this its a bit of a steep learning curve but once you get your head around it things start to get a lot easier.