How to export cloak skeleton from Blender to Nif succesfully?

[corimaith]

I am trying to export the Odin Valhalla Rising Rogue-Asgard armor to Skyrim CBBE with the blender files from Knightmare-Giga. I've managed to succesfully do the main armor in outfit studio, but when it comes to exporting the cloak to support HDT I'm a bit confused on the steps I have to take. 

 

From what I can read from tutorials, you need to build the skeleton manually in outfit studio then manually weight paint and then do some XML to define the HDT. However the blender file already comes with a nice skeleton that's already weight painted, so I would like to use that for the cloak and then somehow attach the spine to the cbbe skeleton. I'm using the PlyNif to export the cloak into a nif, but when I look at the skeleton in outfit studio the bones are all the correct position and still weight painted, but they've lost their parents and are all attached to a single root, and when I try to manually set the parents their position turns crazy. I suspect that's because the positioning they have is relative to the root bone, but calculating the actual positions from there would be a pain.

 

 

So is there a way to export the cloak or the skeleton in the correct state from blender into Skyrim? Or do I need to manually redefine all the bones from scratch? Another bonus question I would ask is that since the "base" armor is esentially just a body with a marble like texture applied to it, is there a way to automatically fit it to the CBBE body rather than using brushes in outfit studio? The proportions, especially between the breast and butt don't quite match the cbbe shape so I need to do some pretty heavy editing to the vertex which often results in some bad shapes once I apply sliders that causes I have to restart. Right now I've resorted to more or less keeping the original shape the same and just making sure the neck and hands fit, but a tighter fit for correct bodyslide presets would be ideal.

 

 

I'm pretty new to 3D modelling and modding, this is my first time trying to do this so I'm probably missing something.