Pretty much since the beginning of this project I've wanted to make use of the 'bent Dwarven scrap metal' part. And pretty much this whole time it's been giving me shit. It was actually the first part I tried to use to connect the skulls to the spine parts on those heads, but when I tested them in-game it consistently refused to actually show up. Swapped it out with the Sphere lid piece and liked how that looked a lot better, so I didn't really delve into why the bent scrap wasn't working at the time. Tried again with it when I was first blocking out what would eventually become the Aster and I managed to get it to show up in-game, but it did the fade-in-and-out thing I've been getting with a lot of the SMIM Dwemer parts, so I gave up on it again. And used the lid instead again, come to think of it.

I recently had another idea that the bent scrap would be well-suited for, so I gave it another go. Tried to use that .obj conversion method that got the variable Edhildil set working, but when I tried to open that in the Creation Kit it just crashed the fuck out. Annoying, but I've run into meshes the the CK inexplicably chokes on before- just about every variant of the stubble hair mesh, for one. You can usually bootstrap the tetchy mesh in by renaming and swapping meshes in the folders. That's how I got the shaved heads to work, anyway. But in this case, the swapped-in bent scrap parts once again just didn't show up. So fuckit, there's obviously something terribly wrong with this mesh, I should try cutting the non-clutter version out of the Dwarven Spider model instead.

There is something terribly wrong with the Dwarven Spider's mesh.  

It's immediately obvious when you first try to move its parts around in Outfit Studio, only to find that it somehow has its axis inverted, and moves opposite of the way you want it to go. Which is annoying, but manageable. Cutting it apart is a bit tricky; it doesn't have each discrete part as its own handy mesh like the Sphere, and the way the parts are connected doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The legs in particular are just hooked in any old how. But after a few tries I managed to get the bent plate and a few other potentially usable parts separated into individual meshes. Exported those to their own .nif files, opened them up, and... the bent plate has lost its textures. Like, completely. The 'shader texture set' section isn't even there in NifSkope. You can add them back in with Outfit Studio's texture interface, but they up and vanish again the instant you close out the properties dialog. I've never seen the like.

So that's four damn tries and this stupid part just isn't happening. But I did cut those other parts out of the Spider, and none of them lost their textures, so I tried playing around with them a bit to see if I could approach my earlier idea a different way. And I was having some success with the main body piece, right up until I tried to apply some body morphs to it. It just wouldn't take them. Just would not conform to the sliders at all. I was about ready to give up on the Spider as a resource entirely when, more or less on a whim, I decided to run it through that .obj conversion to see what would happen. 

All of a sudden the inverted axis issue is gone. And now it'll conform to bodymorphs. And... Okay, it'll still lose the weightpainting if you even look at the partitions tab, but once you save the project to a ShapeData .nif, that mesh works just fine in just about every way. 

Except that the Spider's body is still a very low-poly mesh and reacts very poorly to a lot of the actual bodymorphs it'd be subjected to. Looked great on the base UUNP shape, but the changes from that to a lot of the actual UNP family shapes twisted it up in unwelcome ways. Too bad, really. 

But hey, if the .obj conversion works on the body piece, maybe it'll work on the bent plate?

Yes. Yes. it will. 

After months of trying to get the thing working in multiple applications, I've finally got a version of it that I can actually get in-game. Moves normally, accepted its textures back on, doesn't flicker or fade. It's finally a usable part.

And what was it that got me slogging through the whole process that finally made it usable?

I thought the set could use a vulva cover to go with the pasties.

Yeah, I think it was worth the effort.