Up to this point I have only really gotten a feel for editing/creating meshes and weighting them using blender, but I've unfortunately only played around with Morrowinds Cs. This might be borderline inappropriate for this forum, but I was curious as to how to replace a vanilla race with another custom built race (without using the obse function). I'm only really familiar with replacing/ editing body meshes, not so much with forcing the game to read them. Any help would be awesome, thanks in advance.

You should check out http://sites.google.com/site/grimdeath9740/tutorial:createyourownrace on creating races for Oblivion. The same information applies to altering vanilla races.

Thank you very much, I'll give it a read asap.