Question How to properly adjust animations with movement

Hello,

I'm dealing with trying to set animations along with player movement. however I'm not sure about what am I doing and if it's not over complicating the code.
I wanted to put animations for idle/walking/joggin/running
and also for rightSideStrafe and leftSideStrafe
crouch, etc.

right now this is the code I have for the UpdateAnimator()
but I don't know if this would be the best way to do it. or even if will accomplish what I need. it is working well for forwards and backwards animations, but I can't make it work for sideStrafe.

 private void UpdateAnimator()

        {

            float speed = m_smoothCurrentSpeed;





            if (m_smoothInputVector.x > 0)

            {

                GetComponentInChildren<Animator>().SetFloat("sideSpeed", speed);

            }

            else

            {

                GetComponentInChildren<Animator>().SetFloat("sideSpeed", -speed);

            }







            if (m_smoothInputVector.y > 0)

            {

                GetComponentInChildren<Animator>().SetFloat("forwardSpeed", speed);

            }

            else

            {

                GetComponentInChildren<Animator>().SetFloat("forwardSpeed", -speed);

            }

        }

and here some screenshots of the animator.






sideStrafe:




and Locomotion:





the Locomotion one seems to be working well, however I feel that the code is not well written and could be better formatted to adjust to future animations/cases

 

I believe you can go with this approach, are you facing any issues in this technique?
I mean this looks fine to me and many dev used this approach for basic locomotion.

If you still wanna dig into it deeply you can go through this blog:-
https://unity3d.com/how-to/build-animator-controllers

 

Thank you very much, yes, it worked this time, the issue was the custom controller I had, that somehow was implementing a "smooth transition" but the values were jumping around all the time. I think that made the blending look badly.
also, on top of it, I wasn't putting the proper avatar for the animation and that was also making it look super weird. thank you very much.