How do I organise and save separate animations in blender?

Question

So, most tutorials I have looked at get as far as animation and then put some keyframes in and show the model moving. So below is the three whole keyframes for my idle animation. So, a few questions:

1. How is this related to the model? other than that I've selected the bones in pose mode and moved them?
2. Before exporting, do I somehow need to make these frames an animation in another sense? I tried exporting "with animations" but nothing shows up when the model is imported into Unity.
3. How do I record more than one animation? I see nothing naming these keyframes as a group for a set animation or how I could do so, so right now I'd have to delete them and add different keyframes to do another animation.

These seem like pretty nooby questions, but I couldn't find a video or tutorial relating to it, all my searches essentially let to saving animations as video.

So, my end goal is: Add multiple animations to my model & export it with those animations and import them all into Unity.

Bonus: I'd also love to blend animations without making multiple separate animations (i.e. I'd like to be able to run and shoot at the same time, but not have a shoot, run AND shootAndRun animation, just the first two.

Answer 1

I think I found what you need. If you change the editor type from "Timeline" to "Dope Sheet" (inside the "Animation" group), you should see an option next to it that lets you change the type to "Action Editor". This will let you add new actions and save multiple different animations in one rig.

Not entirely sure how you would do it but I think that you may be able to make only certain bones animate for certain actions so if you are running you can have multiple animations only for the arms, and then have variations with holding different guns and shooting as well. Same with the legs too. So you could try and split the rig into those two parts with seperate animations.