What is the best way to edit FBX animations for free or cheap (under $200)?

Up until now, I have done no 3D work with Unity – it's been all planes, cubes, and NGUI. I did some Blender tutorials a while ago, and that is the extent of my 3D modeling background.

Now, I'm trying to do some feasibility tests with Mecanim. I want to add animations and edit existing animations the robot.fbx that comes with the MecanimTute tutorial, then add them to an AnimationController and control them through scripts. (The animations can be trivial for now, like choppy hand waves. They just have to be distinct.) I'm doing this to get an idea of how time-consuming it would be to obtain existing models (for free or for money), and then edit the animations to get them to do what I want.

For someone with my background, what is the least error prone way to do this?

I have tried getting robot.fbx into Blender by using AutoDesk's FbxConverter to make it into a Collada file, then importing that into Blender, but Blender's importer comes up with nothing. None of the other formats that Blender's import and FbxConverter have in common support animation.

I've also tried importing robot.fbx into Cheetah3D. It seems to drop the animation.

Any suggestions for approaches, software, or anything else welcome!

 

Is cheetah dropping the animation or is it in a different take? Just today i thought cheetah dropped an anim but there were 2 takes... Just had to play back the right one.

 

There's only one take. Although it's still possible I'm not looking in the right place. This is the fbx in question. Do you see anything?

 

There's no animation in your FBX file. It does have a take called "Take_001", but it's empty,
as far as animation goes.

 

Thanks for verifying! I guess Cheetah does really miss it.