Hi Sorensilk,
I'm very new to Unity and Playmaker, so I don't know how much I can help- but I am trying to figure out the same "Gone Home" like object pick up as you- so I'm happy to compare notes, at least.
I'm approaching the issue a little differently than you are, in that I'm starting with your State 3 issues, and I'm later going to go back into the GUI Text and the ability to rotate/examine.
I've made some meager headway, and right now I'm trying to sort out the physics of selecting an object that has a rigid body, is brought to a child object of the Main Camera, and then is able to be dropped.
The first main difference in my approach is that I'm not putting a raycasting script on my character controller. I'm starting with a Mouse Pick Event on the object itself, so I don't need to bother with putting objects on an interactive layer or any variable of what got hit. I'm assuming if I succeed I'll make it into a template, since I never have to specifically name my target GameObject other than the standard "Use Owner" option. I have an FSM with 4 states- NotPickedUp, PickingUp, PickedUp, and Dropping.
Second I just discovered, there is a handy function called "Move Towards" (and also "Rotate"), where after the Mouse Pick Event, I set the Parent to the Main Camera and then Move the game object toward my target, which is myself, the Main Camera. I've successfully been able to lug around test objects this way. When I'm ready to drop it, I just reset the Parent to whatever and there it hangs, floating in the air.
Soo, this is where I'm getting an education on physics, gravity and colliders, which I think are pretty key to putting a bunch of objects all over the place but being able to examine them.
The object to pick up could be inside furniture, so I have a dresser with a drawer you open to get a book object, making my target object a child of a dresser drawer. The object, if it's to be thrown around, will need a rigidbody, that uses gravity and keeps kinematics set to off (I found it counterintuitive that turning off kinematics puts something into a ragdoll state, but I learned that it means the gameobject is *not* being controlled by some other script that dictates it's physics)
My first lesson was that Gone Home must live in a world of meticulously created box, not mesh, colliders, though luckily my dresser drawer can use both. I need the mesh on my dresser drawer in order to have it be openable via a Mouse Pick Event, yet an object must be detectable within. Without a box collider, though, an object with gravity on it plummets down to my terrain, so I had to make a box collider just for the baseboard of the dresser drawer. Once I put gravity on my object, I had to tweak the size of the colliders to get them to visually look right since the colliders seem somehow imprecise. And honestly, while I'm able to set my book on top of the dresser fine, an object with gravity in the drawer bounces around like there's a poultergeist jiggling it around. It doesn't do this when I set it on top of the dresser. A possible issue might be my mode of Collision detection (Discrete vs. Continuous)
So, where this is leading is that both gravity and kinematics are controllable as actions within my PickUp Object FSM. When I pick up my gravity, non-kinematic book, I have an action "Use Gravity" that switches off the gravity, and another action "Set Is Kinematic" which switches Kinematics on. If I don't do that, my book object after the Move Toward is bouncing around my Main Camera instead of being stationary in front of me.
My current problem, though, is that when I do it this way, the Book Object seems to impact itself on me in a way that sends me reeling backwards, and my charachter needs to have Kinematics off to move around. So, not quite sure what to do about this yet.
Anyway, that's pretty much where I'm at and I'm also working on my Drop state, where I think you parent your Object to whatever is not your Main Camera, after having done a "Get Position" of where you are when you drop it, and then a Set Position action of the object your dropping, while turning Gravity back on and Kinematics back off. Probably an iTween Punch or something after that to kick it away.
Finally, I'll also note that I think there's one more state to be considered- rotate object- which I haven't even gotten to. If you notice, in GH, you first pick up an object, then you can move it to another examination point with the 'E' KeyDown and rotate it, so after I figure out all these physics issues I'll add in another state I expect.
I'm happy to supply screenshots, if you want- but again, I am really new so there may be people on here already talking about Skyrim-style pick up FSMs and so on. I just got my account here today, so I'll look around- but otherwise, looks like it may just be us so far, into that styl of pickup.
best!