What's the proper way to save multiple actions on one model?

I made a couple animations and saved them as datablocks in the Action Editor which I plan on importing into Unity a long with the model. But I’m not sure if I did it right, as I have an idle animation that’s 90 frames long and a walk cycle that’s 60 frames wrong. My issue is that only one frame length is saved. So, the walk cycle being the last action I created, if I switch back to the idle animation it will be 60 frames long. If I change it to 90 frames, that’s how long the walk cycle will be if I switch back to it.

So what exactly is the proper step by step of saving multiple actions? I find it pretty confusing

I usually have Timeline, ActionEditor (=DopeSheet) and NLA open together.
Now I do some Animation and give it an appropriate name in the ActionEditor. Then I press the SnowFlake in the NLA in order to turn the animation into an action clip. This clip i can move up the timeline on the NLA Track if desired. I can also always go back to that clip and edit it by pressing Tab.
Now I do some more animation and repeat the above steps.
Caution: as long as I don’t press the SnowFlake icon, I’m still animating in the same action. I can also press the + button in the ActionEditor to make a new action, but the preceeding one is then stored with no user (zero before the action name). If I quit and reopen blender, the NoUser action will be gone.

In the N-Panel of the NLA, I can further edit the clips and strips (slow down/speed up, shorten, blending mode, transitions, repeat,…)


Thank you! I’ll try this out

I’ve messed around with it some more and I still haven’t quite figured out how to do what I want to do.

I want to animate the rigged model in Blender and save those animations, so I can then import those animations as separate assets into Unity. Then I would like to import a clean rigged model into Unity as its own separate asset. I can’t figure out how to save animations in Blender so I can export them without having to include the rigged model in the .blend file. Hope I’m making sense

Don’t know how to import into Unity, sorry.
But here is how your actions should be saved:
In the ActionEditor, give the animation you want to save as an action a specific name. In the NLA, press the SnowFlake so it becomes an action clip (if you want to further animate and make other actions). If you don’t have the action applied to an object in the scene, press the F button so the Datablock has a fake user. Save your file.
Now in another blendfile append the action(s) from the other file (they should be in the Action folder).
Open ActionEditor and NLA. Select an object (which you want the action to apply to), and in the ActionEditor select the action.

Hope this helps