Morrowind animation files

 I finally got a plugin for Blender that lets me open .nif files, which is the format that Morrowind uses for all its meshes (and animations?). I've been looking around the data files folders and found this guy:

I have tried and struggled with and failed to model a human basemesh reminiscent of Morrowind's. My attempts were based around using screenshots of the game to try to approximate the proportions, but my efforts were all doomed. I'm glad to finally have something I can use as a rough reference to ape the style. This is actually the mesh that is used to cast shadows of humanoids in the game; the actual meshes that comprise the characters you can see seem to be built out of pieces (head, hair, left upper arm, right upper arm, etc.) But this is where I want to start.

But I found something actually interesting that I've never heard of before. I can't be sure of this, because I have Tamriel Rebuilt installed and that might be where these come from, but it seems that there were some animations in the base game that didn't make it into the finished product. If you go to Data Files > Meshes > AM > II, there's a couple dozen files in there with names like AM_SitBar, Cleaner, Bandit,  and FarmerScythe. When I first came across these, I didn't know what they were, and when I first opened one up, it was not any clearer.

They all look something like this:

The rounded shape in the middle is the shadow casting mesh ("Tri Shadow"), and all of the boxes correspond to body parts. I'm guessing that this is what a character is before runtime and each of these boxes gets swapped out with the appropriate mesh based on variables inside the character. Interesting to see exactly how the game handles all of the modularity in armor and equipment, as well as faces and hair. But what's even more interesting is what happens when you hit the space bar.

As alive as Morrowind already feels to those of us who love the game, it could have had even more verisimilitude. 

And, holy shit, check out this guy (the file name is "Camonna.nif"):

Unless I am completely misremembering the game, I don't think these appear anywhere in it. Someone needs to correct me if this actually is in Tamriel Rebuilt, and also let me know if this is already common knowledge, but I've never seen or heard of it before.