How can I swap character body parts at runtime?

Hello

I have been looking at 2 examples. Character Customization tutorial by Unity and my project which brings in a model.fbx file.

In Character Customization, when you run the DressingRoomExample scene, a female avatar is created as you can see in the Hierarchy view. When you click on this female node, you can see it has the skinnedmeshrenderer on it and it selects the entire female mesh. The female node has a hierarchy where each child node is simply a transform.

In my project, I imported a male model which has a similar hierarchy to the female model. However, the main node does not have the skinnemeshrenderer component but instead each individual child node has one. The main node simply has Transform and Animation component on it. When you click on the main node though, it does select the entire mesh.

So even though these 2 node structures are different why does Unity interpret them as one character mesh???

Basically I wish to swap out a character's mesh parts in runtime and continue being able to use the character. What are the different things I will need to do for this?

Help appreciated.

Thanks