How to deal with the skin of mod character?

[Froggomancer]

Hello, humans. I recently attempted to make a character mod that can change his form into a fox (red coloured catcoon) on key press, and I reached some unknown regions. I do not know what the proper name of the thing I want is, so the wording of my question might be ambiguous.

I initially attempted to achieve the transformation by pirating woodie's wereness, but all of  my character except his pelvis becomes invisible after transformation. I then attempted to test the transformed state skin by replacing it with wilson's skin, which also becomes invisible. Then I tried to directly exchange the name of the "anim" files of my character and wilson, and now my character becomes invisible on start.

Then I went through the code of "playable pet", and learned nothing. I attempted to investigate the steam workshop mod "Womas (and Wufon)", which drives my mind to confuse further. I saw somthing called "skin bank", which I have never seen before.

Originally I thought the character anim file should all align with some invisible grid, like what Minecraft does, because they do not have an atlas file. I decompiled the .tex file of my character and wilson, and saw that they do not align at all, while seeing tentacles squeezing themselves out of my computer's USB type 3.2 gen2x2 slot, with mucus dripping out of my monitor. 

Then I replace the .tex files with the name of "atlas-0" and "atlas-1" of my character with that of another character, and compress them back to .zip file, and tested it in game. Character was invisible again. I oringinally thought that there will at least be something, like a distorted character, even a crash was expected. But no, there is just an invisible character. An invisible character, with all the other things, like its physics and health systems, working properly.

I wonder how does the game deal with files in the anim folder, how can I implement custom animations/skins/textures, and how can I make the character change its skin/.tex file in-game. How to use AnimState:SetBank and AnimState:SetBuild properly?

Please help me, big-brain humans. 

The tentacles taste like beef, by the way.

Edited July 14, 2022 by Froggomancer

[Rickzzs]

For short, I think you need to learn the skin system. For example, how wolfgang and wanda changes build via skinner component, how AnimState uses bank name and build name and animation name to locate a specific animation. Then learn the structure of anim file, like what's in anim.xml and build.xml, how to use spriter. You will know that Atlas.tex must be understood together with a build.xml(build.bin in binary) so it is futile to experiment on exchanging them.

There are many tutorials in the forums that helps a lot. By the way, you may need proper tools like ktools, ztools, spriter.