Changing multiple biped skins to a single rig

[TB_RIO]

I have 13 bipeds with skinned meshes in a scene. I bought these from a marketplace and have rescaled the with world scaler utility and given them a standard pose so that the biped rig appears exactly the same in viewport (obviously the skins are different).

What I would like to do is combine all 13 skins on to one rig.

My reason for this is to use them in a Tyflow crowd system, inputting each skin as a seperate 'actor' but with the ability to control the underlying animation on one reference rig (rather than 13 seperate ones).

Can anyone point me in the direction of how this might be done? I can add or remove bones from the skin modifier but not swap them for different references. If I just move the modifier from one mesh to another it obviously looks wrong as the vertex references are wrong.

Is this possible?

[10DSpace]

@TB_RIO 

Did you try linking each of the biped's root bone to a dummy parent?  I haven't messed around with Ty Flow crowd, but technically, that would be a single rig.

[TB_RIO]

The rig is actually staying in one place, so the root is more or less stationary. Tyflow deals with the root transforms and the biped rigs just define the animation loops. 

 You might be on to something though, if I broke the hierarchy of each biped and linked each bone to an identical 'master rig' that might work, it would mess things up if I did start wanting to play with the rig actually inside of tyflow though as it imports the bones and hierarchy as well as the skin, which I'm currently just sending to an empty event.

[TB_RIO · Accepted solution]

Ok I got it, just involved saving the weights, applying a new modifier, adding the bones from the master and loading the weights.

I can probably make it even easier as all the bones have the same names, so I guess it's just a case of adding the new bones to each skin mod from a selection set.