Animation on extra bones not working on humanoid

95913-import.pngThank you in advance for taking the time to read my questions!
The rig I made for my character in Maya is a bit more complex than that of an average character, so there are some extra bones that I can’t get Unity to animate. For example; here’s how my character’s spine is set up:

hips<<>>spine00>>>spine01>>>etc

The humanoid system expects the root to be the lowest joint in the spine, and also the highest in the hierarchy, so it really doesn’t know what to do with my “hips” joint, meaning that any animation I have on the character’s hips is simply discarded.
I’ve seen posts saying that I have to manually check the boxes for the corresponding joints in the “mask” settings, but all the joints were already checked, so something else is going on.

Please note that I’m only using the animations on this one character, so not being able to retarget the animations is not a problem. I am aware that Unity does not retarget animations on extra bones unless the rig and skeleton is the exact same.

So - just switch the rig to generic if retargeting is not needed.

Also there is a rule within mecanim that masked bones can not fall between the humanoid bones. I’m paraphrasing - but search around and you’ll find the exact ‘rules’ about this.