Animations looping automatically

The animations in our game are very rigid and specific. There are set points in the animation where hitboxes need to be created and the end signals the next attack.

To do this we created a variable within the animator that transitions based on the id, and assigns a string along with the identifier via a method called "SetAnimation". There was also a variable that signals the animations end called "AnimationEnd" and a method for creating Hitboxes on specific frames using the String assigned to the animation.

The hitboxes work perfectly, but there's some delay between setting an animation and an animation being flagged as over. This causes the anticipation frame of an attack to loop and looks bad.

Our way around it now is adding a bit of padding to each animation, which doesn't really add much to each animation and for the moment seems to be working, we just worry if this is a systemic problem that could affect users in prolonged gameplay settings. We need to know if this has been an issue and if so, how it was approached.