Texture Swapping on Copies of Entities

I am working on a type of fighting game where there will be two or more characters on the screen at one time. All of the characters use the same model and the model has two surfaces. One for the head and one for the body.

So far I've found that if I paint the surface on one copy of the entity it effects all copies. However if I use EntityTexture it only applys to that copy. Difference between a mesh and an entity I suppose.

Is it possible to paint individual surfaces and have it be specific to the entity not the mesh? I would like my logic to be somethign like this:

load model
add animations

model1 = copy model
paint head (model1)
paint body (model1)

model2 = copy model
paint head (model2)
paint body (model2)

Basically I would like to share animation and mesh but not surfaces. I don't know if this even makes sense, but any help/pointers would be great.

Thanks,
-Brian

I'm not certain there isn't a better way to accomplish what you want, but if you want to copy meshes, you do it with createmesh() and addmesh():

model1 = createmesh()
addmesh(source_mesh, model1)

You need to do CopyMesh instead of CopyEntity. That will give you copies with their own set of surfaces.