How to replace human body model keeping skeleton in 3ds max

[cesm1980]

Hi, this is my first post here.

First of all my goal is to be able to animate some dbz tenkaichi 3 models ripped from dolphin (only for private use, not for releasing online), using skyrim's skeletons and animations, i even plan to keep skyrim's model hands since they are a lot more well done than tenkaichi's hand models. For now i just want to be able to be able to animate those characters in 3dsmax, not getting them to work ingame, at least for now.

So far on my own, i achieved to import animations in 3dsmax and any of skyrim's characters and animations, i even already learned how to make new animations with the default bodies in skyrim, thanks to the tutorials i found here, even tough i lost several hours to figure it out.

The part i am really stuck at, is about REPLACING the body meshes without messing up the association with the skeleton... After a lot of experimenting i was able to replace some meshes but i can't believe there isn't a easier way to do this...

After getting the mesh ready in 3dsmax, i scale and translate it so that it's size matches the one from the vanilla body part. Then i go to the correponding body part in the vanilla body part and i copy the two modifiers (skin and bsdismember skin) into the new body part mesh and it kinda works even on animations BUT there is a few problems :

- any translation, scalling and rotating i did on the new mesh after i import it in 3dsmax (before adding the references) get's reset after adding the modifier references. The best i was able to do was to manually adjust (translate) the object's pivot point to the middle of the head of the vanilla body while keeping the mesh in the desired body part, but this only keeps the translation, not the rotating and scalling

- the characters i am trying to port are not the same height (specially the dbz kids like gohan and goku, not even when using skyrim's child body model) and i have no idea in how to adjust this so that the animations keep working, their bodies are shorter than skyrim's human models

- that thing of the elements i am having a lot of trouble i don't know how to "create" new elements in the new body meshes, using detach to element doesn't seem to do anything

Unfortunately i haven't found a single tutorial in how to replace body meshes, i have seen the tutorial in how to change the horse body mesh but i don't just want to "move" vertices, i need complete mesh replacement, and even change the skeleton's proportions.

Can anyone help me on this ?