Can you control specific limbs of an armature through code?

[crystal viper]

[SOLVED]
Hi all! 🙂
I'm trying to setup a player controller in Unity, mixing animators and code.
I have a pre animated 3D dude (from the asset store), with idle, walk and run animations. What I want to do is use the premade animation for the waist down, and let the player control the torso and arms with mouse and keys. Imagine you're about to walk the plank with your back unnaturally upright, and you can move the mouse left and right to rotate the spine in a Z axis, (i.e. leaning to the sides) and can lower or raise your arms, (or even bring them forward), with a different input, maybe Q/E or mouse forward/backward.

The thing is I'm trying to find documentation or tutorials for this, and all I can find are tutorial for fully animatin with the Animator component, and that's not what I want nor need.
How can I access specific parts of the armature in order to rotate them through code?
Here's the setup that I have:

It's a 3D character with an Animator, that has an AnimatorController with 3 animations, idle, walk, run.
The animations are controlled using the Animator's state machine through code, like animator.SetBool("run", cc.velocity.magnitude > minimumSpeed );
The armature has a gazillion bones. I deleted the animations points from the spine up, so only hip below is animated. Currently the model is walking around T-posing. The project is already setup to take (old input system) inputs with WASD and mouse, and the camera is setup to an almost fixed POV so the character moves around and rotates like in any fixed-camera game.

[drifting dawn]

you can probably try Animation Rigging package

that overrides the animations and you can control specific parts manually

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.animation.rigging@1.0/manual/RiggingWorkflow.html

[crystal viper]

Thanks 🙂
Can't it be accessed directly through code? I'm trying to use as little packages as possible, and I also need to do other checks depending on the angle at which the parts are.

[drifting dawn]

maybe if you reference the bone transform manually but don't know if you can override that or animator takes complete contro, unless maybe you use an avatar mask

also its a built in package, mind as well use it if its right for the job

[crystal viper]

I couldn't seem to find the rig builder as a component. Every tutorial shows it as simple as finding it in the drop down menu, but I just straight up don't have the "animation" category.

I'm trying to find the bones through code but can't figure out HOW. How do I even know the type of the component in order to GetComponent<> ?

[drifting dawn]

the package is in PackageManager it must be installed first. I meant built it as in it works with animator

[drifting dawn]

you can just [SerializeField] private or public as a Transform and drag n drop through inspector the bone you want there

[crystal viper]

YES, that's it. I can't believe I didn't think of that in the freaking beginning OMG

I can access the whole transform, both position and rotation yessss😭 😭 🙏 🙏