Humanoid Avatar

Unity’s Animation System has special features for working with humanoid characters. Because humanoid characters are so common in games, Unity provides a specialized workflow, and an extended tool set for humanoid animationsAn animation using humanoid skeletons. Humanoid models generally have the same basic structure, representing the major articulate parts of the body, head and limbs. This makes it easy to map animations from one humanoid skeleton to another, allowing retargeting and inverse kinematics. More info
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The Avatar system is how Unity identifies that a particular animated model is a humanoid, and which parts of the model correspond to the legs, arms, head, and body.

Because of the similarity in bone structure between different humanoid characters, it is possible to map animations from one humanoid character to another.

The following topics provide more details on humanoid animation and root motionMotion of character’s root node, whether it’s controlled by the animation itself or externally. More info
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• Retarget Humanoid animations
• Inverse Kinematics
• How Root Motion works
• Scripting Root Motion