Thanks for this! I used the old method for facial expressions and was confused why it wasn't working anymore! Hopefully the devs can maybe figure out a simpler solution for this in the future
I'm a bit confused on how to record the empty clip. Where do you find the floor collider to then change it to the empty clip? And how did you change that floor collider into the empty clip?
For the empty clip you just want to record toggling something on or off and then you click the recorded object in the animation and press F2 which will allow you to rename it. You just want to rename it to something that doesn't exist so that the name in the animation turns yellow. It's basically just indicating to the animator that something is being played when transitioning back to our default state (the empty clip), but we don't want the empty clip to actually do anything itself since we're just using that animation to allow our reset layer to properly reset our blendshapes when we aren't doing a hand gesture! Hopefully this helps out, but if ya have any other questions just let me know and I'd be glad to clarify anything I can!
Thanks a lot for the tutorial. It works great with the exception of the left and right gestures mixing. Is there a way to stop playing an animation from the left hand when the right hand is activating a gesture? Thank you!
I assume that you are talking about about accidentally having two hand gestures going at the same time (i.e. fist in right hand and finger point at the same time). Usually when layers are affecting similar things (such as blendshapes for your avatar's face in this scenario), the layer in your FX controller that is lowest will overwrite layers that are above it (hence why we put the reset layer at the top for when you aren't doing any gestures at all). So long as you aren't doing a hand gesture in your left hand at the same time, your right hand should work fine, but if you do them at the same time then the left hand will take priority because it is (presumably) lower in than your right hand's layer in your FX controller. If you would just prefer that your right hand is the dominant hand for gestures, then you could just swap it to be below your left hand gestures. There is a way around this with a more complex set up for hand gestures, but I mostly wanted to give people a good place to start at with this video. If you are interested in a more complex setup for hand gestures, Hai's ComboExpressions package is quite good and allows for you to set up combo expressions (i.e. you can have gesture right do finger point and gesture left be rock and roll and that would be it's own expression, separate from just going finger point or just doing rock and roll).
Hi, sorry about the late response! What I do for my ears is have a similar setup to my gestures layer (like this one) and just have the ears move how I want them to when I go to a particular expression. I.e. if you duplicated you expression layer and replaced the animations with your ear movement animations, that is essentially what I do.
Augh I've combed through this video a bit and I can't figure what I did wrong to get the facial expressions to not change at all, just staying at idle face. Could it have something to do with mask on AllParts? Mine is set to vrc_HandsOnly. I also can't figure out how to get the blue bar to appear under animations to show that they are running (that being said they do not run when I change the values in parameters). Despite not working so far I am thankful you've taught me how to set expressions for both hands, so once I get it working I can have two different sets!
The layer priority goes from bottom to top, so the lower a layer is in your FX controller, the higher priority it takes over any layers above it. Another way to go about preventing over-lapping face expressions is taking this information about layer priorities and then resetting every unused face blendshape to 0 in each face animation. I.e. If you make a happy face and use a "mouth smile" blendshape and a "happy eyes" blendshape, you would want to reset all of the other face expression-related blendshapes to 0 in that animation as well. You'd rinse and repeat this for every face expression you have and it get rid of the need for the "Reset Layer" but it is a bit more work to set up overall.
Animation doesn't go back to idle face. I have gone through the video 8 times now, and I have no clue what I have missed. It's like the previous animation partially carries over to the next while testing in Unity. And in VRChat the idle face is something totally different, and sometimes the idle face goes together with the animation at the same time. Write default is off on everything it seems
You will want to make sure that your reset layer is set to loop and continually firing to reset your blendshapes, otherwise blendshapes might "stick" between animations. If there are mixed "write defaults" then that can cause issues with systems like this, so it would be good to double check that they are off for every animation throughout the entire FX controller.
Sorry for the late response. You will want to make sure that you have made those parameters in your parameter list if they aren't already in there. They are case sensitive and you will want to use an "Int" for "GestureLeft" and "GestureRight" as well as floats for "GestureLeftWeight" and "GestureRightWeight"
Oh, like an idle afk animation? I have only tinkered around with that once before, but it's something I can look into! Do you have anything in mind when you ask that, like having the body itself do something, or causing objects/a scene of some sort to spawn?
Love these tutorials. A lot of vr chat tutorials are like 30 minutes long when they only need to be like 5, so thank you! Unrelated, but do you have any idea how to do physbone toggles? I haven't seen any videos on toggling them on and off for certain objects
Really glad that ya love the tutorials, I really enjoy making them! And in regards to the physbone toggle, if you have your physbone components on a gameobject that can be toggled off, then you can just toggle that gameobject off and it will turn the physbones off too. I.e. if you had a scarf with a physbone component on it, if you toggle the scarf gameobject off, then the physbones will also get toggled off.
@@XeoTheFreshReindog You can still. I have the whiskers on my avatar (which are apart of the base mesh) on an empty game object on my avatar's base. I just put the Physbone Components in there and then drug the root of the whiskers into the root transform location on the physbone component. That way you can just toggle off that empty game object that has your physbone component on it!
@@XeoTheFreshReindog No worries! So when you right click in the hierarchy you can create an empty gameobject. On that empty gameobject I place my physbone component(s). I then drag and drop in the root bone for the chain of bones I am wanting to have physbones for. I.e. I have a "Whiskers Root Bone" that then has "Whiskers Left" and "Whiskers Right" under it that are the chain of bones for my avatar's whiskers. So, on my empty gameobject that I made with the physbone component, I drag my "Whiskers Root Bone" into the root transform in the component, set up the bones to move how I want them to, then make a toggle that toggles that gameobject on and off. Since the physbones are on that gameobject, if it's off, then the physbones get turned off too. This lets you turn things like hair styles, ears, tails, etc. toggles off along with your physbones as well. Depending on the toggle, you might just be able to put your physbone component on the object itself, but sometimes you can't, so you need to make an empty gameobject and place your physbone component on that so you can toggle the gameobject on and off, which also ends up toggling the physbones too.
First off, thank you for this! I finally managed to figure things out and this tutorial was a big help. I got all the facial expression I need working on the right hand. But im actually having trouble setting it up for the left hand too. I want the left to be able to do the same expressions. Is this possible?
You definitely can! You'll want to just do the exact same thing you did for the right hand, but change the parameters in the transitions from the respective "Right" parameters to "Left" instead.
@@RaiPiez I would personally keep them in separate layers (left hand in one and right in another) so you can swap in new animations later down the line more easily if you want to.
i did this setup on the left and right hand layers with the rest expression u said and this didnt work at all for me. the avi face is just stuck on idle ( for me is default look so everything set to zero in idle). can u make a video how to set up both hands with the 7 gestures each where the expressions dont overlap or get stuck?
Things shouldn't be getting stuck! You'll want to make sure that your reset layer is set to loop so that it will continually play over and over, you'll also want to make sure that layer is above your gesture layer(s). Other than that, the other gestures are just down to your personal preference for each animation and just replicating what I demonstrate in the video, but using the other hand's parameters while also using 1 - 7 instead of the 3 that I use here!
Hi! The hobkin that I have is actually one that I commissioned someone to modify for personal use! I don't have any public versions of it at the moment, but I do intend on uploading some public versions of the model for others to use on VRC in the future! I'm glad that you like it though! I absolutely love hobkins!
In the older versions of avatar, I was somehow able to make my eyes close *as* I pulled a trigger (hand close). Having the trigger completely pulled down would have the eyes completely close, and releasing would slowly open the eyes based on how far out the trigger is. Any clue how I could replicate this in avatar 3.0? It's something I love dearly, and my personal models just wouldn't feel complete without it! Thanks.
You would want to use the "GestureRightWeight" or "GestureLeftWeight" parameters to scrub across an animation for something like that. It would be extremely similar to the hue slider video I did, but you'd have it use the blendshape for your eyelid closing and opening instead of the hue shift.
Thank you so much, I had been having problems for such a long time and there isn't alot of video's put there acually helping me, but u saved me!! Also small question, how would i make it so that for example I can change the rock n roll hand gesture to a middlefinger?
When you click on any of the default hand gestures given in your FX controller, under the inspector window that pops up on the right, there should be an option that says "Motion". For RocknRoll, that option is defaulted to have "proxy_hands_rock". You can replace that hand gesture with any hand gesture you want for that respective hand. I found a free middle finger gesture on Booth for the left hand. Hope this helps you!
Glad the video was able to help out!! And chibi_eevee nailed it on the head for swapping out the hand gesture. There are quite a few sources out there for hand gesture animations in regards to things like booth and gumroad, or you can make your own if you want to really get involved with it!
l tried this tutorial and when l tested on unity it was working well, when l build and test it on vrchat nothing happened, my single animation of just closing the eyes didn't work
Sorry for the late response! I am glad ya figured it out though and I'm happy the video was helpful! If ya have any other questions just let me know and I can try to help ya out!
As of right now this should work fine even if you make your project with the VRC Creator Companion! If things change in the future I will definitely re-visit this topic and make a new video that is relevant to the most up-to-date and proper method!
If you understand the concept for the gestures here pretty well, you basically apply the same layout of this to your ears as well. You make a reset animation that is recording your ears being at their default position for your "reset" animation and then create animations that have your ears move into particular positions and just mirror that layer with your expressions layer. I.e. for my happy face in my expressions layer I do gesture right = 3. So in my ears layer I would do the exact same thing and run it to the animation I want it to play for my ears when I do gesture right = 3 (finger point). Hopefully this gets you on the right track, but if you have any other questions just let me know!
@@uzie1200 I can look at making a tutorial video for that specifically. I do believe in one of my videos (I think the headpat video) I briefly show adding an ear animation in along with a face animation when someone headpats you, but I could definitely make a video that goes over the topic a bit more thoroughly.
Thank ya! I love the OG Hobkin look personally and it's kind of become the look that all of my friends know me by! Been in the Hobkin for about a year and a half now and have loved every second of it!
Hmm, something you could do if you wanted to is for each face gesture animation you have, make them reset all of your other blendshapes (essentially integrate the reset layer animation into each face gesture you make) so that none of them overlap or get stuck. It's more work, but I believe that would technically work fine! But the way I show here is the default/normal way that pretty much every creator uses for resetting blendshapes when using Write Defaults off!
@@Wolfy527 that's sort of what I was thinking. Combo gestures would be achieved through setting the layers to additive. But I'll probably just use your method. Just caught me a little off guard heh. Thanks for the video.
@@Poly_0000 When I did combo-gestures at one point on my avatars I actually combined the two layers into one and created transitions based on which combos I was doing. The reset layer concept still applies the same if you want to do it that way, or you could have each animation reset all the blendshapes not in use if you'd prefer to set that up in each animation, but either way should work!
@@Wolfy527 Thank you for genuinely being incredibly helpful. I have one last question. Why empty clips instead of states with no animations? I've tried the latter and it leads to weird behavior. Why does unity treat these two things differently?
@@Poly_0000 To be honestly, I personally don't know what exactly is occurring in Unity and the animator that can cause odd interactions when a state does no have a motion (an animation) in it with WD off, but I know that it is alright to do when WD is on for toggles and such. I presume it has something to do with the fact that any time a transition occurs when WD are on, the entire animator is refreshed (to their default state or current animation) and all active animations are applied, whereas with WD off, this "refresh" does not occur as you have to do those things manually, hence why we create a "idle" animation to reset things. The reason for using an empty clip in a state that isn't technically supposed to be doing anything is exactly what you said. There are odd behaviors and interactions when you don't do so. So I, as well as others use an empty clip for transition animations/buffers/etc. when using WD off as it prevents buggy/odd interactions from occurring. The nice thing about it is that you can drag in the same empty clip whenever you need a buffer/empty state like that, and then you can just rename it to whatever you need in the animator to keep things understandable in your logic and such! And I'm happy to help! I've wanted to make videos and be helpful for people wanting to learn Unity since it's something I wish I had when getting into avatar and world creation! If ya do have any other questions just let me know!
Thanks for this! I used the old method for facial expressions and was confused why it wasn't working anymore! Hopefully the devs can maybe figure out a simpler solution for this in the future
No problem, happy to help out!
thank you for this video! this is the first video that made sense to me!
Happy that the video was helpful and made sense!!
I'm a bit confused on how to record the empty clip. Where do you find the floor collider to then change it to the empty clip? And how did you change that floor collider into the empty clip?
For the empty clip you just want to record toggling something on or off and then you click the recorded object in the animation and press F2 which will allow you to rename it. You just want to rename it to something that doesn't exist so that the name in the animation turns yellow. It's basically just indicating to the animator that something is being played when transitioning back to our default state (the empty clip), but we don't want the empty clip to actually do anything itself since we're just using that animation to allow our reset layer to properly reset our blendshapes when we aren't doing a hand gesture! Hopefully this helps out, but if ya have any other questions just let me know and I'd be glad to clarify anything I can!
Your tutorials are the best! Thank you for taking the time to make them ❤
should i be using the base gesture animator for this?
Thanks a lot for the tutorial. It works great with the exception of the left and right gestures mixing. Is there a way to stop playing an animation from the left hand when the right hand is activating a gesture? Thank you!
I assume that you are talking about about accidentally having two hand gestures going at the same time (i.e. fist in right hand and finger point at the same time).
Usually when layers are affecting similar things (such as blendshapes for your avatar's face in this scenario), the layer in your FX controller that is lowest will overwrite layers that are above it (hence why we put the reset layer at the top for when you aren't doing any gestures at all).
So long as you aren't doing a hand gesture in your left hand at the same time, your right hand should work fine, but if you do them at the same time then the left hand will take priority because it is (presumably) lower in than your right hand's layer in your FX controller. If you would just prefer that your right hand is the dominant hand for gestures, then you could just swap it to be below your left hand gestures.
There is a way around this with a more complex set up for hand gestures, but I mostly wanted to give people a good place to start at with this video. If you are interested in a more complex setup for hand gestures, Hai's ComboExpressions package is quite good and allows for you to set up combo expressions (i.e. you can have gesture right do finger point and gesture left be rock and roll and that would be it's own expression, separate from just going finger point or just doing rock and roll).
would this work if say i wanted to cast spells off my avatar with certain hand gestures?
Yeah! If you wanted to set up a layer to cast spells depending on what gesture you used, you could do something similar to this!
One one of the expressions I have ears I want to toggle the active state of - how would one do this?
Hi, sorry about the late response! What I do for my ears is have a similar setup to my gestures layer (like this one) and just have the ears move how I want them to when I go to a particular expression. I.e. if you duplicated you expression layer and replaced the animations with your ear movement animations, that is essentially what I do.
how do I get the gestures to actually work in game
Augh I've combed through this video a bit and I can't figure what I did wrong to get the facial expressions to not change at all, just staying at idle face. Could it have something to do with mask on AllParts? Mine is set to vrc_HandsOnly. I also can't figure out how to get the blue bar to appear under animations to show that they are running (that being said they do not run when I change the values in parameters). Despite not working so far I am thankful you've taught me how to set expressions for both hands, so once I get it working I can have two different sets!
When I make another layer for the other hand, it can do multiple animations at same time. Any way to make sure only one at a time?
The layer priority goes from bottom to top, so the lower a layer is in your FX controller, the higher priority it takes over any layers above it. Another way to go about preventing over-lapping face expressions is taking this information about layer priorities and then resetting every unused face blendshape to 0 in each face animation. I.e. If you make a happy face and use a "mouth smile" blendshape and a "happy eyes" blendshape, you would want to reset all of the other face expression-related blendshapes to 0 in that animation as well. You'd rinse and repeat this for every face expression you have and it get rid of the need for the "Reset Layer" but it is a bit more work to set up overall.
Animation doesn't go back to idle face. I have gone through the video 8 times now, and I have no clue what I have missed. It's like the previous animation partially carries over to the next while testing in Unity. And in VRChat the idle face is something totally different, and sometimes the idle face goes together with the animation at the same time. Write default is off on everything it seems
You will want to make sure that your reset layer is set to loop and continually firing to reset your blendshapes, otherwise blendshapes might "stick" between animations. If there are mixed "write defaults" then that can cause issues with systems like this, so it would be good to double check that they are off for every animation throughout the entire FX controller.
in the conditions, i dont get the options for gestureleft, ect.. howd you set that up?
Did you ever figure this out? I am having the same problem.
@@spaghettios2662 no
Sorry for the late response. You will want to make sure that you have made those parameters in your parameter list if they aren't already in there. They are case sensitive and you will want to use an "Int" for "GestureLeft" and "GestureRight" as well as floats for "GestureLeftWeight" and "GestureRightWeight"
I have a video request on how to install AFK motion please
Oh, like an idle afk animation? I have only tinkered around with that once before, but it's something I can look into! Do you have anything in mind when you ask that, like having the body itself do something, or causing objects/a scene of some sort to spawn?
Love these tutorials. A lot of vr chat tutorials are like 30 minutes long when they only need to be like 5, so thank you!
Unrelated, but do you have any idea how to do physbone toggles? I haven't seen any videos on toggling them on and off for certain objects
Really glad that ya love the tutorials, I really enjoy making them!
And in regards to the physbone toggle, if you have your physbone components on a gameobject that can be toggled off, then you can just toggle that gameobject off and it will turn the physbones off too. I.e. if you had a scarf with a physbone component on it, if you toggle the scarf gameobject off, then the physbones will also get toggled off.
@@Wolfy527 what if I combined the objects with the original mesh? Any way then or no?
@@XeoTheFreshReindog You can still. I have the whiskers on my avatar (which are apart of the base mesh) on an empty game object on my avatar's base. I just put the Physbone Components in there and then drug the root of the whiskers into the root transform location on the physbone component. That way you can just toggle off that empty game object that has your physbone component on it!
So do you make an animation where you toggle the bone in the armature? Or do you make a new object? Sorry it's a bit confusing to me
@@XeoTheFreshReindog No worries! So when you right click in the hierarchy you can create an empty gameobject. On that empty gameobject I place my physbone component(s). I then drag and drop in the root bone for the chain of bones I am wanting to have physbones for. I.e. I have a "Whiskers Root Bone" that then has "Whiskers Left" and "Whiskers Right" under it that are the chain of bones for my avatar's whiskers.
So, on my empty gameobject that I made with the physbone component, I drag my "Whiskers Root Bone" into the root transform in the component, set up the bones to move how I want them to, then make a toggle that toggles that gameobject on and off. Since the physbones are on that gameobject, if it's off, then the physbones get turned off too.
This lets you turn things like hair styles, ears, tails, etc. toggles off along with your physbones as well. Depending on the toggle, you might just be able to put your physbone component on the object itself, but sometimes you can't, so you need to make an empty gameobject and place your physbone component on that so you can toggle the gameobject on and off, which also ends up toggling the physbones too.
First off, thank you for this! I finally managed to figure things out and this tutorial was a big help. I got all the facial expression I need working on the right hand. But im actually having trouble setting it up for the left hand too. I want the left to be able to do the same expressions. Is this possible?
You definitely can! You'll want to just do the exact same thing you did for the right hand, but change the parameters in the transitions from the respective "Right" parameters to "Left" instead.
@@Wolfy527 So, do I use a new layer? Or simply add on the left condition with the right
@@RaiPiez I would personally keep them in separate layers (left hand in one and right in another) so you can swap in new animations later down the line more easily if you want to.
@@Wolfy527 Thank you! for some reason I had trouble setting it up in another layer, but I got it to work after trying again!
@@RaiPiez Awesome! Glad ya got it working!
i did this setup on the left and right hand layers with the rest expression u said and this didnt work at all for me. the avi face is just stuck on idle ( for me is default look so everything set to zero in idle). can u make a video how to set up both hands with the 7 gestures each where the expressions dont overlap or get stuck?
Things shouldn't be getting stuck! You'll want to make sure that your reset layer is set to loop so that it will continually play over and over, you'll also want to make sure that layer is above your gesture layer(s). Other than that, the other gestures are just down to your personal preference for each animation and just replicating what I demonstrate in the video, but using the other hand's parameters while also using 1 - 7 instead of the 3 that I use here!
Hey to get that avatar bc i want a hobken a really cute
Hi! The hobkin that I have is actually one that I commissioned someone to modify for personal use! I don't have any public versions of it at the moment, but I do intend on uploading some public versions of the model for others to use on VRC in the future!
I'm glad that you like it though! I absolutely love hobkins!
In the older versions of avatar, I was somehow able to make my eyes close *as* I pulled a trigger (hand close). Having the trigger completely pulled down would have the eyes completely close, and releasing would slowly open the eyes based on how far out the trigger is. Any clue how I could replicate this in avatar 3.0? It's something I love dearly, and my personal models just wouldn't feel complete without it!
Thanks.
You would want to use the "GestureRightWeight" or "GestureLeftWeight" parameters to scrub across an animation for something like that. It would be extremely similar to the hue slider video I did, but you'd have it use the blendshape for your eyelid closing and opening instead of the hue shift.
@@Wolfy527 Thank you so so much! I am eternally grateful! (Just like the lil' alien guys from Toy Story). :)
@@boom3011 No problem! Happy to help out whenever I can!
Thank you so much, I had been having problems for such a long time and there isn't alot of video's put there acually helping me, but u saved me!! Also small question, how would i make it so that for example I can change the rock n roll hand gesture to a middlefinger?
When you click on any of the default hand gestures given in your FX controller, under the inspector window that pops up on the right, there should be an option that says "Motion". For RocknRoll, that option is defaulted to have "proxy_hands_rock". You can replace that hand gesture with any hand gesture you want for that respective hand. I found a free middle finger gesture on Booth for the left hand. Hope this helps you!
Glad the video was able to help out!! And chibi_eevee nailed it on the head for swapping out the hand gesture. There are quite a few sources out there for hand gesture animations in regards to things like booth and gumroad, or you can make your own if you want to really get involved with it!
l tried this tutorial and when l tested on unity it was working well, when l build and test it on vrchat nothing happened, my single animation of just closing the eyes didn't work
Nevermind l found the solution to it, l forgot to say, great vide 😉
Sorry for the late response! I am glad ya figured it out though and I'm happy the video was helpful! If ya have any other questions just let me know and I can try to help ya out!
will these unity skills still be applicable in the vrchat creator companion update?
As of right now this should work fine even if you make your project with the VRC Creator Companion! If things change in the future I will definitely re-visit this topic and make a new video that is relevant to the most up-to-date and proper method!
How do make your ears move while also using the expressions?
If you understand the concept for the gestures here pretty well, you basically apply the same layout of this to your ears as well. You make a reset animation that is recording your ears being at their default position for your "reset" animation and then create animations that have your ears move into particular positions and just mirror that layer with your expressions layer. I.e. for my happy face in my expressions layer I do gesture right = 3. So in my ears layer I would do the exact same thing and run it to the animation I want it to play for my ears when I do gesture right = 3 (finger point).
Hopefully this gets you on the right track, but if you have any other questions just let me know!
@@Wolfy527 I'm sorry to ask this but do you mind making a video about it? If not, that's fine.
@@uzie1200 I can look at making a tutorial video for that specifically. I do believe in one of my videos (I think the headpat video) I briefly show adding an ear animation in along with a face animation when someone headpats you, but I could definitely make a video that goes over the topic a bit more thoroughly.
Nice Avi x3
Haven't seen the old hobkin for a bit :3
Thank ya! I love the OG Hobkin look personally and it's kind of become the look that all of my friends know me by! Been in the Hobkin for about a year and a half now and have loved every second of it!
It seems kind of janky to reset the facial expression on every frame. Isn't there a more elegant solution?
Hmm, something you could do if you wanted to is for each face gesture animation you have, make them reset all of your other blendshapes (essentially integrate the reset layer animation into each face gesture you make) so that none of them overlap or get stuck. It's more work, but I believe that would technically work fine!
But the way I show here is the default/normal way that pretty much every creator uses for resetting blendshapes when using Write Defaults off!
@@Wolfy527 that's sort of what I was thinking. Combo gestures would be achieved through setting the layers to additive. But I'll probably just use your method. Just caught me a little off guard heh. Thanks for the video.
@@Poly_0000 When I did combo-gestures at one point on my avatars I actually combined the two layers into one and created transitions based on which combos I was doing. The reset layer concept still applies the same if you want to do it that way, or you could have each animation reset all the blendshapes not in use if you'd prefer to set that up in each animation, but either way should work!
@@Wolfy527 Thank you for genuinely being incredibly helpful. I have one last question. Why empty clips instead of states with no animations? I've tried the latter and it leads to weird behavior. Why does unity treat these two things differently?
@@Poly_0000 To be honestly, I personally don't know what exactly is occurring in Unity and the animator that can cause odd interactions when a state does no have a motion (an animation) in it with WD off, but I know that it is alright to do when WD is on for toggles and such. I presume it has something to do with the fact that any time a transition occurs when WD are on, the entire animator is refreshed (to their default state or current animation) and all active animations are applied, whereas with WD off, this "refresh" does not occur as you have to do those things manually, hence why we create a "idle" animation to reset things.
The reason for using an empty clip in a state that isn't technically supposed to be doing anything is exactly what you said. There are odd behaviors and interactions when you don't do so. So I, as well as others use an empty clip for transition animations/buffers/etc. when using WD off as it prevents buggy/odd interactions from occurring.
The nice thing about it is that you can drag in the same empty clip whenever you need a buffer/empty state like that, and then you can just rename it to whatever you need in the animator to keep things understandable in your logic and such!
And I'm happy to help! I've wanted to make videos and be helpful for people wanting to learn Unity since it's something I wish I had when getting into avatar and world creation! If ya do have any other questions just let me know!
🤍🖤🤍