SSE Customizing Armor Pieces Ingame - Toggle the "Hidden" flag on meshes via script

[JLtheMad]

This is more of a suggestion and hypothesis than a request. The tl;dr is in the title.

 

Melee weapons have a "bloody" mesh on them (well, actually 2), that is flagged as hidden. When a weapon swing hits certain targets, the game starts rendering the "bloody" mesh. It seems to me, that the game does a 3-state color test on the render, according to how bloodied the weapon is.

Assuming the previous statement as close-enough - regardless of weather the flag is being toggled, or the mesh is being rendered in part despite the flag - it could be possible to do that to other meshes. We could have, say, a framework, to access the meshes proprieties, and then those cloud be controlled through scripts.

The first way I can think of using something like this, is to customize armor pieces in game. Many mods come with different parts, distributed in different equip-able items, in different armor slots. That has some down sides, like how its hard to make npcs use them properly, competing with other mods for those slots (AllGUD, for instance), or interfering with the mechanics of other mods, by having more items equipped than intended.

Just to extrapolate the idea further, since each armor item is a separate entity, those could even be randomized on generation, to give the world a more varied look (that assuming, vanilla armor replaces properly set up for this). There could be a menu to customize an item. The valid meshes within each model would probably have to have a boolean, to determine weather or not that mesh is toggle-able, and a string, to mark competing slots (say, different options of left-pauldrons). Since male and female armor use completely different models, you either wouldn't be able to customize how and item looks for the opposite character model (without having to change your character's gender), or you'd have to have an option to choose witch variant of the item is being edited. Don't think it would be realistic that suddenly people would be making armor sets with entirely equivalent, customizable, armors for both genders. Make that menu accessible only through a crafting station, requiring a smithing perk related to the armor's material, and we can even call this immersive and lore-friendly.

 

Or maybe it doesn't work...