Help in making an outfit replacer mod for a total noob

[Roofie]

I'm not quite sure where to post about this...
I've acquired a pair of wonderful mods, from the nexus, that add beautiful lorefriendly-ish dresses to the game Urshi's Noble Wedding Dress[www.nexusmods.com] and ShinglesCat's SC - Noble Dresses[www.nexusmods.com] (a retexture of the same dress mesh).
At the moment they are either stand alone, or a replacer for the wedding dress.
What I want to do is replace all the noble/jarl/fancily dressed women's clothes (including things like the party outfit, wedding dress, and refined raimants that I think Elisif wears), in the game with their dress mesh, the differing textures offered providing variety where possible.
This would generally just be for personal use, exclusively, as I have no intention of uploading it anywhere without permission.
The issue is, I have never ever done any sort of mod creation. I don't even know what to do or where to start.
Do any of you folks happen to have an easy to follow tutorial for doing such things - that is beginner friendly? Or is anyone lovely and patient enough to walk me through the process? Or even willing to *le gasp* do it for me?
It would be nice to get these ladies out of those hideous 'fine' clothes and into some perdy ♥♥♥♥.

[Zefram Cochrane]

First of all you need The Gimp a graphics editor program and secondly you need a plugin that will let you open .dds files

Then look for the clothes.dds files in the Data\Texture\Clothes folder and away you go...

[MorningLightMountain]

Unsure on how you would globally do so and I've only just started playing around with the creation kit myself. You can I think change the outfit an NPC has on. If you look at any NPC in the actor's section one tab has what has their active outfit and their sleeping outfit which I believe is classed as an armor package. You can create a new one and add the clothing items you want them to wear.

[Incunabulum]

SImplest way - open up the CK and look at Elisef's entry. Check out what outfit she is wearing. Open up the entry for the outfit and look at the mesh/texture files it says it is using and change those. No need to create a whole new item and mess with changin the outfit.

Then you simply need to put the mesh and texture files in the right spots in your /Data directory.

Doing that will mean that *all* instances of this item will use the new meshes/textures. If you simply wan to replace *just* this item, then you'll have to go the long way - create a new item and then modify the outfit for the NPC to wear that item (and insure that the NPC actually *has* that item to wear, otherwise they'll still be nekkid).

[Roofie]

Originally posted by Incunabulum:

SImplest way - open up the CK and look at Elisef's entry. Check out what outfit she is wearing. Open up the entry for the outfit and look at the mesh/texture files it says it is using and change those. No need to create a whole new item and mess with changin the outfit.

Then you simply need to put the mesh and texture files in the right spots in your /Data directory.

Doing that will mean that *all* instances of this item will use the new meshes/textures. If you simply wan to replace *just* this item, then you'll have to go the long way - create a new item and then modify the outfit for the NPC to wear that item (and insure that the NPC actually *has* that item to wear, otherwise they'll still be nekkid).

Yes I want to replace all female instances of these outfit types :) so this is helpful ty.

Using your info, and since Elisif is as good a starting point as any, I've managed to find out what mesh she's used for her outfit. However, I'm not particularly sure how to find out which textures have been assigned to that mesh - is there a place to view this in the CK also? Or is it a case of being able to pick them out by eye in the BSA?

[Roofie]

SO, I've been able to get Elisif to wear the outfit I want by putting the meshes into the directory of meshes/yarlsclothes03. The issue I am having now is that it ignores any textures I put in textures/yarlsclothes03 and continues to use the base ones provided by the original mod - which is default at textures/Urshi/weddingdress. Is there a way to change this association? As I assume everyone I get into this mesh will wear the same texture with this issue.