Making an auto-updating NPC - CharacterAppearance?

I haven't fully dived into using it on the NPC I'm working with but would like to ask if anyone knows a better way of going about this or if what I want to do works at all.

What I want to do: Have an NPC assume the appearance of a player not-in-game

I was thinking of using

game.Players.Player1.CharacterAppearance = "http://www.roblox.com/Asset/CharacterFetch.ashx?userId=" .. game.Players.Player1.UserId

but of course an NPC has no relevance to the service Players. So does anyone know how I should go about this?

I'm not familiar with the new joints systems so was hoping this would clear up any mess I'd have in writing it from scratch; in terms of getting all the accessories (hats) where I need them to be.

A method that I use for inanimate player-models is:

1. Equip the clothing items that you want the model to wear
2. Go to Studio and click Play, then Pause the game
3. Open your Explorer Tab and go to Workspace, then the Group-Item with Your Player Name
4. Copy all items inside the Group to your clipboard then Stop The Game
5. Create a New Brick on your Baseplate, then right-click to select 'Group'
6. This will group That Single Brick, to which you will Paste Into the stuff you copied
7. You'll find that it creates a large group box - find the Group called 'Model' in Explorer
8. Find the brick called 'Part' then Delete It
9. Congratulations, you've found yourself making a copy of a player-model!

If you've followed the method above, you'll find two things...
One: All Items of Clothing or Accessories are retained, cloned from the Real Player Model
Two: You can Insert Your Own Custom Script, or a Dialog attribute to the Model's 'Head' brick
Note: if you choose to insert a 'Dialogue' attribute, you must insert it IN the Head brick only!

But, what you asked for was an 'auto-updating' NPC model...

I'd say that the script you provided as evidence is able to do it. But make sure to smooth out the syntax and also make a CDN-checker, to see if the model or skin is unavailable.
I use the term CDN, not for Content Delivery Network, but for: Content D-something N-something, cool stuff right? Right..? ...