If you were animating a controllable character using the 3rd person controls, would you trigger the changes directly using wasd keystrokes, or does the 3rd person controller provide values that can be plugged into mecanim?
I'm not quite sure I understand. The third person controller uses an Animator controller along with a few scripts to control the movement of the character, which typically refers to the horizontal and vertical axis values. You use the script to change the values of the parameters used within the Animator controller. This course goes more in-depth with using characters: https://cgcookie.com/course/fundamentals-of-rigged-animations/
