What are tags used for in the Animator window?

I notice you can give animation states tag names
Does this allow to control a animation state by tag name?

I'm wanting to make a animation scene for my character select window.
Where you click a character and they do some animation.
So I'm thinking I don't need animation transitions for this.

Any thoughts that would help me
If I can control animation states by tag name I can't find anywhere in the manual that talks about this.

Anyone know of any resources for this

thanks

 

Tag are user define data. A tag can be used to identify a state or a group of state.
Are runtime you can query what is the tag of the current state.
http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AnimatorStateInfo.IsTag.html

By example you could use tag to identify all your state that does control your combat mode and change the music to something with more drive or increase the volume.

 

It would be very convenient to be able to query the animator for all the states with a tag. A lot of very basic, useful, and safe stuff of mecanim is hidden at runtime. Why is that? Do you have a rework on the roadmap? Mecanim is good to work with in the editor and quite a pain in the brain to work with at runtime.