Preparing for the new skeleton/new set of animation:

Extract "Fallout - Meshes.bsa" in a new empty folder (named DEST for example) using
bsaopt or another tool.
Remove everything in DEST but the folder "meshes\characters\_male"

Rename "meshes\characters\_male" to a unique name of your choosing, say

"meshes\characters\_TestAnim".
It MUST resides into the meshes\characters folder.

If you use third-party animation or third party body, replace any file in DEST by
the ones found in your "Data\meshes\character\_male"

In DEST, you need to delete the movement animation that you no longer want/need and
add/replace the ones you want from your new
"skeleton package".

For movement animations, they don't have to be named as the animation you are
replacing but you can only have 1 file for each
movement, so keeping the names may be easier. (Aparently the first one found is
used).

And finally, replace the skeleton by the one you want to use. It MUST be named the
same as the other(s) skeleton(s), so most likely
skeleton.nif.

Consider making a BSA of the DEST folder, so activating it later will be easier,
name it TestAnim.bsa.

Use FNVEdit to copy Idle definitition from "meshes\characters\_male" to

"meshes\characters\_TestAnim":

1) load FNVEdit with all the mods providing animation you want to use.
2) right click anywhere in the left pane and select "Copy idle animations
into..."
3) select ONLY characters\_male\idleanims
4) change the mod prefix to characters\_TestAnim\idleanims
5) leave the EditorID prefix to remove blank.
6) enter test anim as the prefix to add.
7) leave the suffix to add blank.
8) select a new empty file to receive the idle anim definitions, name it
TestAnim.
9) Accept any required master, they provide some animations.
save the plugin.

Activate the ability to have multiple skeleton in NVSE: (NVSE 4.5 Beta 6d or newer
required!).
Edit (or create) the text file Data\nvse\nvse_config.ini to include:

[Animation]
EnableAnimationHook=1

Change at least one NPC skeleton to see the result:

By script, using SetModelPathEX.
With FNVedit, editing the property MODL to point to
"meshes\characters\_TestAnim\skeleton.nif" instead of
"meshes\characters\_male\Skeleton.nif"
Note that the GECK will preserve the modification.
At that point, this should load without CTD and show in game.
Now it is time to create new animation to make use of that and also limit playable
animation to those you want/need.

Issues:
Failing to provide any IdleAnims for a skeleton leads to CTD, but I haven't
found yet which idle are required and which could be deleted.
This will block the vanilla ability to provide a different skeleton for male
and female.