Ah!

So I initially brought the mocap sword animations into Unity by having them all on one model, importing the model with animations, and then splitting them using frame numbers in Unity. This seemed to work, but after some reading I realized it might be pain to add on more animations to this model, which I would eventually want to do since I'm starting out with a small subset of motions,  so most of yesterday I tried importing the animations with different files.

I read that you could import just the model.fbx, which contains the mesh and the skeleton but no animations, and then for every animation you can import model@animation1.fbx and Unity will link the two automatically. I'm not sure what I did wrong but I could NOT get Unity to recognize that they were the same. I tried all kinds of different export settings from MotionBuilder and different names but it would NOT work. So I started investigating how I can link them up manually by creating an animation controller and building up the animation state machine. This is good because I wanted to make a motion graph for my animations anyway, and the animation state machine that Unity provides seems to do the job. I know there are built-in 3rd person animation controllers in Unity but again after some reading, it seemed like that wasn't the best option for what I want to do and that I should build one from the ground up.

... we'll see. It's frustrating that this is all such unfamiliar territory but like I said before, I guess that's the learning process?

On the game tree side, I realized my tic-tac-toe game had some issues as after extensive testing, the computer didn't always pick the best option. Trying to nail down where those errors are now.

I haven't left my house since 5pm Friday... going a little stir crazy! Thankfully my mom sent me a few pictures of my (12 year old) baby dachshund and the newer addition to our dachshund family at home to keep me motivated.