Combining Multi-piece armor sets

[TechnicallyAPerson]

I've been trying to figure out how to combine the Dragonbone Barbarian, Celes Nightingale and Daedric Reaper armor options into a single body piece, but seem to be missing some steps.

I've watch a video called Armor Mash Up part 1 and 2 on youtube and read a guide on it dealing with from Fallout 3 (but both use older versions of nifskope than i'm using and therefore have options and steps I can't replicate).

I'm copying the branch from one onto the other with both main parent branches being called 'Scene Root' and then renaming the branch that becomes the child, but when I save it sanitizes all the nodes of the new child that are duplicate names of the new parent. For example if doing Celes Nightingale I paste the leggings on the chest piece, but the chest piece has the body in it already as well as parts that cover most of the legging parts, because it needs to display the character skin textures in those places if the stockings aren't being worn of course.

I have tried it both renaming the pasted in branch from scene root, and keeping it a scene root (the chest piece already has multiple scene root branches, so i'm not sure this is an issue).

Anyway after I replace the chest piece in the mod with the new combined chest piece it CTDs the game when equipped. I imagine this is because there are sanitized nodes with generic names now?

I don't know really exactly what the rest of the steps should be. What i'm trying to do isn't exactly what the guides I'm reading are trying to do, because they are often placing whole armors over each other and just erasing the parts that are under the clip, but I don't want anything erased, at least I think...I want everything to show up, just together and all withing a single mesh for the chest piece.

I haven't even moved on to the dragonbone barbarian yet, since it is even more pieces that need to be fit together.

If anyone with experience in making this work could help me I would really appreciate it!

[SpyVsPie]

Use Outfit Studio instead. 

[TechnicallyAPerson]

On 3/17/2019 at 8:49 PM, SpyVsPie said:

Use Outfit Studio instead. 

OK i took your advice, watched some videos on this, but the only ones I could find with detailed explanations were for fallout 4. I can load up the top and stockings mesh for celes nightingale just fine, adjust them and save the mesh. When I open it in nifskope it shows up fine as well.

When I load it in game it doesn't CTD like it did when I was just working with nifskope, but the texture for the stocking isn't showing up, just the top. Now the .esp for the mod clearly doesn't point to a stockings texture when creating the AA for the Cuirass, but I am not sure how to make it recognize both.

In the video for fallout 4 doing this with outfit studio it just worked when he loaded up the game when he replaced the armor mesh, since the mesh itself points to the textures, but the stocking part of my new mesh also points towards the textures for it in the shaders part, so I'm guessing it's an issue with the .esp?

If anyone can point towards a good tutorial of how to do this in SE I would appreciate it, or just give me some advice!

[SpyVsPie]

When you say the stockings texture doesn't show up do you just mean the stockings are invisible or that they are doing the pink/purple missing texture thing? If they're invisible it's likely that you just haven't changed the bodyslot in OS. Load the OS project, select the stockings and click partitions in the top right, change the stockings to the same bodyslot as the rest of the outfit (looks like you are trying to add them on to the body/chestpiece, right? So it would be slot 32) click apply and save. 

[TechnicallyAPerson]

On 3/21/2019 at 11:27 PM, SpyVsPie said:

When you say the stockings texture doesn't show up do you just mean the stockings are invisible or that they are doing the pink/purple missing texture thing? If they're invisible it's likely that you just haven't changed the bodyslot in OS. Load the OS project, select the stockings and click partitions in the top right, change the stockings to the same bodyslot as the rest of the outfit (looks like you are trying to add them on to the body/chestpiece, right? So it would be slot 32) click apply and save. 

Wow that was exactly the problem. Thank you so much I got it working! Now I just need to rearrange some paths in the Armor Addon part of the .esp and I'll be all set.

I can't wait to create a bunch of outfit mashups now!