What can mecanim do in 4.3?

Ok so I have encountered a number of issues concerning mecanim. Things which used to work don't seem to so I am wondering what mecanim is capable of so I can decide whether to keep trying to get things working or not.

Can mecanim handle retargeting? At the moment it looks like all it is doing is putting the animation on my character but using the skeletal positions of the animation's original avator.

Can mecanim handle extra bones? I see the unchecked bones in the masking transforms, once checked they stay gray and animations retargeted in other applications and imported as fbx animations dont seem to work, they leave out extra bones and make a mees of the leg positions and more.

There is supposed to be literature on the subject of mecanim and 4.3 but after googling and searching here I cant seem to find it so a link would be great. Also any info on what is going on with the system would be greatly appreciated. If everything is working then there are steps I have forgotten.

Kindest regards.

 

As far as extra bones. I have used them and they work if you check the box for them. If you mean for example having 2 bones for a wrist to aid in twisting and help curb deflation as the hand rotates then I don't think that works. Mecanim seems to only want one bone for a wrist for the configuration of humaniods . It makes sense since it would break Ik stuff if you started having longer bone chain lengths then what it was designed for.
You could just have one bone act as a parent but use extra bones that are children wrist bones in the hierarchy to do that actual deforming to help with twisting. Inside your program of choice add modifiers and all that to override the hierarchy and get the behavior you want.

Retargeting-isn't that what it's suppose to do? I don't use that feature.

 

Thanks for the reply!
Yeah my skeleton is exactly the same as the standard rigs that come with the unity projects except for tail and eye bones which don't need animating when I use straight animations from mecanim.