Blending More Than Two Animations

Hello everyone, going to be my first post here. What I am trying to do is blend more than two animations at one time. I have an animated rock golem where currently I have 3 animation sequences separated in unity.

First one is a 4 second loop where all the tiny rocks are floating around the body and arms - I want this to be on a constant loop all the time no matter what happens

Second animation sequence (nothing actually being animated) has the golem in a leaning forward position - I want this to blend in while he is moving forward

Third animation is his idle animation where he is slowly floating up and down - this will play while the character is not moving

My question is, is it possible to blend all three of these together at the same time? I have tried animating everything separately but it just looks very dodgy and it cuts off between animations even when cross-faded. What I am currently doing is keeping everything in separate layers and using blendmode.Blend to combine the animations. I tried additive but it doesn’t work at all. My aim is to do the animation the smart way, so I can later on add an aggressive idle animation and combine it with lean forward to make him charge at the player.
Please let me know if I’m going the totally wrong way here, it just made sense in my head that I should be able to do it. I’m not a top notch coder either, so humor my ignorance :::]

Thank you in advance for the help!!

The key is that Blend will average the animations. Most of what you want to do is adding. The trick to adding is to play a regular (non-Add) animation on a lower layer, then play all the adds you want on top.

If you Blend leanForwards and idle, you get leaning 1/2 as much forwards and moving your arms 1/2 the angle (if you were scratching your nose, you are now moving your arm 1/2-way to your nose and wiggling your finger a little.) You can change the weights, but that will simply help one and hurt the other (90% idle will almost get your arm to your nose, but only lean 10% forward.)

I’d set idle/walk/run … on layer 0. Then lean as an Add on layer 2 (I assume you’re using the UnityDocs animation example of leaning sideways as an Add. It really does work.) Then set floatyRocks as another Add.

Making a good Add animation is a little tricky. You have to be sure to start at rest position and only animate the changes. Instead of position, think change. If your golem is in DaVinci pose, leave it like that and just move the rocks. When you add that to an “arms at sides” animation, it will look fine. If floatyRocks also pulled down the arms 90 degrees to the sides, as an Add it will torque the arms of your prefectly good idle into some odd direction.