I want to define a set of mesh "parts" that are randomly connected together in different ways using physics joints. I understand how to connect the mesh parts together using joints, but what I don't understand is if it is possible to add skinning between those meshes within the game. For instance, instead of importing a human character (already skinned) and assigning a ragdoll to the various meshes/bones, I would like to create the character out of a selection of meshes determined by the game and some how enable skinning between those meshes to improve the characters appearance. Is that possible?
This is possible, although not necessarily easy ;-)
The Mesh class has fields for the bind poses and bone weights for each vertex. If you can create this information from the models you assemble (and assuming you can combine them together to make a single mesh), you can do custom bone animation.