Problems importing rigged character animation interacting with solid object

I just want to make a player animation consisting of two legs and a skateboard that I can import to Unity. I don’t mind if I have to pose positions on every keyframe of the trick. I just want a jump animation that shows the legs jumping off the board and doing a kick flip and landing back in the same position that I can import as my character jump animation in unity. I have done this before years ago in 3ds max and it seemed nowhere near as difficult as it is with Blender. I’ve rigged my legs in blender and I have a skateboard mesh object underneath that I’ve parented to the legs and also tried parenting to the legs root bone. I've tried looking up tutorials on attaching guns to hands but they all seem to say to parent the gun to the hand bone, but wouldn't that just keep the gun in the same position as the hand without being able to animate it separating (like for a gun flip toss/catch)? I used pose mode to pose the leg keyframes and object mode for keying the board flip. They all start in one position and I’ve keyframed it so they all end in the same start position. It looks fine in Blender but the board is all over the place when I import to Unity. It doesn’t look like it’s attached and the animations are all split up individually and the board morphs and deforms not at all like the animation in Blender.


My question is, is it possible to animate a rigged character interacting with a solid object (solid object that consists of no bones) in blender that I can import properly into unity as a single “jump” animation? Do I need to rig the skateboard even though I don’t want the skateboard mesh to deform or bend at all? Do I need to make one animation for the legs and then a separate animation for the board and link the two animations to my character mesh in Unity so that both of the individual animations play at the same time making it look like my character mesh in unity is animating as one? Is it just a parenting issue? Been trying to figure this out for a while and can’t seem to find where I’m going wrong.

Also since my character is just legs and a board I'm wondering if it's still best to model the character in T-pose (just the legs) with the skateboard underneath and use humanoid animation? or generic? Right now the character mesh is just the legs bent on the skateboard in the idle pose.