One thing I noticed so far on rigged vs mecanim. Is mecanim forces the object to whatever values are in the keyframes. S…

With rigged characters like humanoids you could indeed “use root motion” which is supposed to move the character similarly to the animation. If you have a ball you wouldn’t need to use animations at all to move it forward. You could just move the ball forward by script using something like Transform.Translate : https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Transform.Translate.html or you could also just use physics to apply a force to a rigidbody on the sphere.

Even easier, you could just use the Characters package which has character controllers already built in.

Are you referring to the walk parameter? Remember that’s based off the vertical axis. So when you press the W key or the up arrow we’re increasing the vertical axis value above 0. The transition towards “walk fwd” happens when it detects a value greater than 0.1 and since we have “use root motion” enabled it starts moving forward when walking.

When using the cube you’d specify specific positions/rotations/etc to animate the object. So if I have two sets of keyframes, one starting off at position x of 0 and the second set at position x of 1 it’ll move forward to that x position of one each time.

You could use the exact same setup for the rigged character for the cube. When the walk parameter is above 0.1 we could transition into a second cube animation. The parameter has nothing to do with the actual movement of the object it’s just a value used to determine when the animation will transition.

The animation itself determines how/where it’s going to move. Hope that makes some sense. Parameters just provide the condition of when to transition.

This is turning into a bit of a long discussion, would you mind posting this on the community? I get what you’re saying, it’ll be easier to explain there with some more graphical elements to help out a bit.