[Help] Conceptual question on multiple animation clips

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I was hoping someone could help me understand a conceptual problem I've run into with animation clips. I am working on a pair of disembodied arms for an FPS-style game, which I've rigged and created an idle animation that I am reasonably happy with. This is a pretty basic IK rig with controllers for the wrist positions and pole vectors to control the elbows. 

My next step is to create additional animations (Interact, Melee Attack, Shoot, etc). This is where I'm stuck and I feel like I'm misunderstanding some Maya concepts here. I've been googling and following tutorials on animation clips and animation layers for days, but the answer eludes me: How do I create multiple animations the right way? 

This is what I'm trying to do:

1. Create the Idle animation, add it as a clip in the Time Editor. 

2. Create additional animations, add them as their own clips in the Time Editor.

3. Export the model with Game Exporter so that it has a set of separate animations that I can reference in-game (Not a single animation with all the animation clips laid out in sequence) 

I have tried the following:

- Use animation layers (the "old" layers in the layer editor, not clip layers): I created a BaseAnimation layer using the Idle animation, then created another animation layer for the Interact animation. This seemed to work, except I was not able to create a clip from the Interact animation layer - It looks like the "old" layers are not supported in the Time Editor. 

- Just use clips: I created a clip from the Idle animation, and that worked. However when I go to create a second clip, I can still see the keyframes from the Idle animation in the Graph Editor (since the Interact animation is also using the same IK hand and elbow controllers). In various tutorials, I learned how to arrange clips sequentially in the Time Editor, but said tutorials just showed how to add the additional clips by dragging and dropping FBX files onto the Time Editor - Not how to create the additional clips from scratch. Additionally, this method looks like it will end up exporting all the clips sequentially as a single animation, which is not what I'm looking to do (unless the Game Exporter fixes that and slices up the timeline accordingly).

In summary:

- Once I've created my first animation and saved it as a clip, how do I start working on a second animation that is independent of the first one, without the first animation's keyframes showing up in the Graph Editor? 

- How should I structure my project/clips to achieve multiple independent animations? Do I need to create one Composition for each of the independent animations, or should those be clips within a single Composition?

Thanks for your time!

[Anonymous]

For anyone who stumbles on this from Google years in the future: Turns out the answer was simple. 

After creating an animation clip from your first animation, just mute the Time Editor and the keys will disappear from the Graph Editor, allowing you to work on another animation. Exporting with the Game Exporter created an FBX file with separate animations.