Why is Animator placed on Player Object?

[Dyego_Alehandro]

Both the supplied example model and other Synty Studios prefab characters already contain an Animator component, yet Rick makes a new Animator component on the Empty Game Object named Player.

When I attempted to do that with my Synty models, they would not follow any kind of animation direction. Only by using the Animator on the model itself was I able to get things working. So my question is this: why does Rick put the animator on the Player object instead of using the built-in model Animator, and secondly, am I going to come across issues going forward by using an animator directly applied on the model?

[Dyego_Alehandro]

Aaand a message from Future Dyego™: I answered my own question! To all Future Readers™, the only way I was able to get this to work properly was indeed to have the Animator placed on the Player Object, because that’s where the Mover script and the Nav Mesh Agent are placed and without that we get various “Missing Component” issues.

So to rectify the situation I simply removed the Animator component on the Synty prefab and that fixed things up nicely to where everything worked as it did in the video.

Also a helpful hint for anyone who is using other Synty Studios products (you really should be, by the way, as Rick says they are awesome) THIS video may prove extremely helpful: How to animate a character with Mixamo for Unity - (Tutorial) by #SyntyStudios - YouTube

You’ll just do the final parts differently and use a blend tree instead of the process used there.