One issue I have had from the very beginning of this project was sourcing the first-person animations for the different items and objects used in the game. when it came down to it the only solution was for me to take the rig from the asset pack I was using and animate it myself in Autodesk Maya. The problem with this was that whilst I have previously used Maya for animating I could not successfully generate an inverse kinematic controller for the joints on the model. This meant that all animations created for the game are done using forward kinematics, which was very difficult, I also struggled to get a good reference to what the animation would look like in-game from the camera's perspective so had to keep going back and adjust it.
Later, when animating I found a way to include the model along with the original rig, this helped a lot in being able to judge how animations were looking by eye, seen in the picture below.
One smart idea I had was to take advantage of Unity's interpolate feature. Using the animator's transition features which it would automatically calculate joint movements from one animation to another. I could save time on not having to create animations such as transitions from holding to throwing or holding to blocking, this also worked with switching weapons and saved me a lot of time.
Thanks for reading!