Recommendations on Managing Animations

Everytime I've joined a new project, I've found animation management lacking. I don't have a good solution, but discovering what animations do what has felt like a chore. I would really like to hear what others experiences have been with various management options.

To help solve things like

• easily finding objects that use a particular animation
• Finding other animations that can work with the object and child references.
• Finding objects in a scene that have matching name and field references as used by an existing animation.

Maybe those aren't even the best questions I should be asking. But what is the mentality I should have to manage animations in existing projects. Any tips or advice to get there will be great. If there are some good articles that already cover, or videos that would be great.

I have a separate question I've posted to Unity Answers on this.

 

It's not an answer to those specific questions, but my Animancer plugin (link in my signature) has a very significant effect on the way you can manage animations. It lets your scripts reference animations in the inspector instead of relying on magic strings to control an Animator Controller that was set up separately. The documentation talks a bit about the problems with Mecanim and why I decided to replace it.