Mecanim Npc control

So! im using mecanim to manage some animations in a pet project im working on. just the state machine with no root motion, the movement is handled via transform

Guys i was wondering what is the best way to set Animator floats for a npc? i have been using charactercontroller.transform.forward.magnitude to tell the animator the npc is moving forward. this however seems clunky and at the moment it can only be set to 1 and never back to 0 when he is not moving.

Behold my Scripty awesomeness! Any thoughts on the issue would be great. My aim is to have a drop on defualt animator script that can detect the gameobjects movement to set Vertical,horizontal,rotation floats in the Animator. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

using UnityEngine; using System.Collections;

public class npcAnimator : MonoBehaviour {

 private Animator            _anim;
 private CharacterController _control;

 // Use this for initialization
 void Start () {
     
     
     _control = GetComponent<CharacterController>();

     _anim = GetComponent<Animator>();
 
 }
 
 // Update is called once per frame
 void Update () {
 
 }

 void FixedUpdate()
 {
     float v = _control.transform.forward.magnitude; 
     _anim.SetFloat ("Speed",v);
     
 }
 

}