Hello! I have a character whose hiearchy looks like this:


And I have done simulation on a few of the meshes inside that I want to layer on top, overwriting the original animated versions.
That hiearchy looks like this:


However, when I try to layer these two files, I null out the skeleton which disables the animation. I cannot use cached geo to drive the animation for this project. Any help is appreciated! Thank you

I suspect you need to change the way you're authoring that "overlay" layer so that /Character_GEO is "untyped" (or a pure "Over" prim) rather than a "Defined" Xform prim. As you've currently authored this layer, referencing it onto /root/Armature/Character_GEO will turn your Skel prim into an Xform prim. You probably also don't want /Character_GEO to be marked as a "Component". The Kind of this prim should be left blank.