A few questions about animations and mecanim.

I'm trying to set up (and understand for the first time) the mecanim system and there are some things I'm a bit lost on. These include some things in the animation import as well as in the mecanim states/trees. To give the full picture I'm importing a generic (model definitely not humanoid) avatar and trying to get everything set up correctly. Here are my questions...

1. In the animator preview there are two transforms. One large transform that sits in the middle of my character and one tiny transform that starts off on the ground in the middle of the circle but is left behind as my animation moves forward. What are these two transforms? Specifically the tiny one. I noticed for the animations in the Stealth tutorial the little transform follows the humanoid animation.

2. My animations drive the locomotion of my model. I can see this in both the animation preview as well as with the GameObject in the scene. However, in the blend tree, compute threshold always results in 0 regardless of what I try to compute with. Why might this be?

3. When blending two animations with a transition, I can get it set up so it blends well at that exact point of the first animation (the one we are transitioning out of). However, there's no guarantee that this point will be the point when the transition actually activates. I'd like to be able to check out the blend at a various points of the first animation. However, if I move the slider and the second animation, it's destructive to the blending I had set up. What's a good way to do this? Or do I misunderstand the transition blending all together? In my mind, if I could couple the time slice (where the blending occurs) and the second animation to move together, then this should let me test the blend at different points.

Thanks!
C.J.

 

I think pictures would help u get more responses. A video for the 3rd question

1.animator preview-I think your talking about the stuff that represents direction and center of the bottom of your character. I use humanoid settings and the red directional doesn't get left behind. That seems to only happen with generic if you animate the character moving forward from its start position. If you want root motion then that is what you want. If you want a character to move in place then its not.
2.if your getting 0 it seems like you have no root motion or the root bone is wrong so its not picking up on it. I would download the mecanim example scene asset and check out the robot scene which has a generic character using root motion. Good reference point.
3.not sure what the problem is