Guide on adding a new model, animation, and creature to HoMMV

I've encountered this problem, and maybe someone with some knowledge can help.

I'm trying to export models of different knight heroes from the game and then import them back in.

There are bones with names like:

"Global|Hip|R_Thig"

"Knight_Global|Hip|Chest"
And so on.

Maya doesn't recognize the "|" symbol and turns it into some kind of mess. But that's only half the problem; the worst part is that you can't rename the bone correctly either because Maya simply replaces the "|" symbol with "_".

Consequently, the model is imported into the game with different bone names, and the old animations no longer work correctly.

But I took a different approach. I tried using a hex editor to change the bone name in the old animations from the game. It worked. But here's the problem: the hex editor only finds the bone names in the old files; it doesn't see them in the files from the expansions. That is, the names are found for Godric and the regular knight, but not for Laslo and Duncan. I'm wondering what possible solutions there are. Maybe someone has some ideas?

If I edit the mb file with a hex editor before importing and rename the bone there, the game imports it incorrectly and complains that it cannot build the bone hierarchy. The hex editor also doesn't recognize the bone names in the files imported through the editor.