Animator not replicating animations

[crusherfire]

1. What do you want to achieve? Keep it simple and clear!
   I need animations for NPCs in my game to replicate. These NPCs have their network owner set to a random player and that player has the responsibility of controlling the NPC and playing the animations.

2. What is the issue? Include screenshots / videos if possible!
   Animations are not replicating to the server or other clients.
   

3. What solutions have you tried so far? Did you look for solutions on the Developer Hub?
   The server creates the animator instance, the client has network ownership over the NPC, and the client’s animation script uses the animator in the NPC created by the server.
   Based on that, the animations should be replicating, but they’re not!

I thought that my animate script may be the culprit, but if I do the exact same process of creating and running the animation script for the player’s character as I would do for the NPCs, it works fine. It’s only my NPCs it’s not working on.

This is either a Studio bug or I’m not doing something correctly, although I can’t figure out what! Any help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT:
docs say the following:

If the Animator is not a descendant of a player character, its animations must be loaded and started on the server to replicate.

I’m going to try pre-loading animations on the server first.

[crusherfire]

If I parent the NPCs to my player’s character, then the animations start working, but obviously having a bunch of NPC models as children of my player’s character is not a practical solution.

Preloading animations on the server did not work and it seems like the client can only replicate animations from animators that are descendants of their character model.

What I’m looking to achieve is likely not possible.