Mecanim and Animancer are extremely different systems so directly converting between them isn't possible, but this page explains how the features of Animator Controllers correspond to the features of Animancer.

Animation Clips

Any AnimationClip that can be played in an Animator Controller (Humanoid or Generic but not Legacy) can also be played in Animancer. The Getting Animations page lists the most common ways to get and create them.

States

• Animancer doesn't require you to pre-define states, you just give it whatever AnimationClip you want to play.
  • When you first play an animation or transition, Animancer will create an AnimancerState for it which allows you to control all details like its Speed and Time. Any time you play the same animation or transition on the same character, it will return that state.
• You can use Transitions to pre-define details like Speed alongside the AnimationClip.
• The Generate Transition context menu functions on everything inside Animator Controllers (states, transitions, etc.) allow you to extract some of the details into Animancer's Transition Assets. This includes transition durations, speeds, exit times, and the configuration of Mixer States from Blend Trees, but it doesn't include any logic like parameters or transition conditions because those things are handled entirely in scripts when using Animancer.
• Unfortunately, Animancer has no way to Mirror animations at runtime or anything similar to Write Defaults because those features are not exposed by the Playables API.
  • You can still mirror animations in their import settings though.

Transitions

Animancer's Transitions work very differently to those in Animator Controllers:

• They allow you to set up details like the Fade Duration and Start Time in the Inspector.
• They don't define any conditions or logic to determine when the transition occurs. A transition is basically just a bunch of additional data you can use in a Play command, so choosing when to call Play is entirely up to your scripts.

The conditions in the above image will make the transition occur if the MeleeAttack trigger is set and the StateTime is greater than 0.16 and less than 1, which would look like this in a script:

[SerializeField] private AnimancerComponent _Animancer;
[SerializeField] private ClipTransition _MeleeAttack;

void MeleeAttack()
{
    float normalizedTime = _Animancer.States.Current.NormalizedTime;
    if (normalizedTime > 0.16f && normalizedTime < 1)
        _Animancer.Play(_MeleeAttack);
}

• Instead of setting a trigger parameter, the script can just call the MeleeAttack method when you want to attack. If you want it to keep trying to attack for a short time after the player presses the attack button, you could use an Input Buffer.
• Instead of requiring a script to get the current state time to set the StateTime parameter every frame so that the transition condition can check it, the script can just use the current state time directly in its checks.

Parameters

• Animancer has no direct equivalent to parameters since all the control logic is handled by your scripts. So if you want to choose between animations based on an int, you can just put an int field in your script then set it and check its value like any other variable.
• If you have a custom curve in your animation which you want to access in a script, you can use an Animated Property.

Blend Trees

• Animancer can play Blend Trees inside Controller States.
• It also has Mixer States which serve the same purpose but have some differences in their implementation as described in the Blend Trees vs. Mixers section.

Sub-State Machines

• Sub-State Machines are often used in Animator Controllers to simply group states visually in order to keep them organised rather than as actual logical constructs. In that case, they are unnecessary in Animancer since you can already arrange your animation references however you like. Using Unity's [Header] attribute or a [Serializable] type can be useful for organization.
• If you do actually want to have a state with other states inside it, Animancer's Finite State Machine system allows you to put a state machine anywhere, so you could simply give a state class its own state machine.

Layers

• Animancer's Layers are created at runtime using scripts rather than being pre-defined in an Animator Controller, but other than that they are roughly equivalent.

State Machine Behaviours

• Animancer's animation system has nothing like StateMachineBehaviours because it isn't supposed to manage your logic.
• Animancer's Finite State Machine system allows you to define your states as individual scripts which can be used to implement anything you would have done with a StateMachineBehaviour.

Inverse Kinematics

• Turning on Inverse Kinematics is different in Animancer, but after that everything basically works the same.
  • Unfortunately, due to limitations in the Playables API Unity will only ever call OnAnimatorIK with the layerIndex parameter set to 0.

Late Update

• Any system that uses a LateUpdate method to modify things after the animation is applied but before the frame is rendered will work exactly the same with Animancer.
• If you want a script to be updated during the animation update, you can have it implement IUpdatable.

Animator API

The AnimancerComponent.Animator property allows you to access the Animator component directly if you need to, however many of its members don't work with Animancer (in most cases they are simply not relevant).

The following members work normally:

• runtimeAnimatorController - Used to play Native Animator Controllers, in which case all of the Animator members work normally in regards to the Animator Controller (but not for any separate animations played through Animancer).
• Root Motion: angularVelocity, ApplyBuiltinRootMotion, applyRootMotion, bodyPosition, bodyRotation, deltaPosition, deltaRotation, gravityWeight, hasRootMotion, isHuman, pivotPosition, rootPosition, rootRotation, velocity
• avatar, humanScale, isOptimizable
• cullingMode, updateMode
• fireEvents
• Bone Transforms: GetBoneTransform, hasTransformHierarchy, SetBoneLocalRotation
• Inverse Kinematics: GetIKHintPosition, GetIKHintPositionWeight, GetIKPosition, GetIKPositionWeight, GetIKRotation, GetIKRotationWeight, leftFeetBottomHeight, pivotPosition, pivotWeight, rightFeetBottomHeight, SetIKHintPosition, SetIKHintPositionWeight, SetIKPosition, SetIKPositionWeight, SetIKRotation, SetIKRotationWeight, SetLookAtPosition, SetLookAtWeight, SetTarget, targetPosition, targetRotation
• isInitialized
• hasBoundPlayables, playableGraph
• Rebind
• StringToHash - Works, but serves no purpose since Animancer doesn't rely on hash codes.

The following members don't work directly:

It is unknown whether or not the following members work: (please email animancer@kybernetik.com.au if you can confirm what these members are actually supposed to do so they can be tested):

• feetPivotActive
• logWarnings
• Animation Recording: playbackTime, recorderMode, recorderStartTime, recorderStopTime, StartRecording, StartRecording, StopPlayback, StopRecording