Backpacks and adding static meshes to them. (Making static meshes into equippable items)

[DaleTheeMagnificent]

As someone pretty darn new to modding, I've taken what I consider a 'shotgun' blast approach to it. More or less, getting my feet wet by just trying to do a little of everything. Some stuff I did okay at, a lot I just outright crashed and burned at. (To be expected ofc.)

 

Now that I've gotten farther into my journey and some minor experience in using a lot of the tools, I want to go back to some of my first failures and re-try. The biggest being a custom backpack.

It uses Qwibqwibmods Canvas Backpack as a base which I have added regular static meshes onto to give it a more unique look. (Throwing hatchet, bedroll, pickaxe, trooper helm, etc.) It was a pain in the ass for a good bit since I really learn best by just doing and failing but I slowly made progress till I hit a wall. I managed to get it into blender and added weight to the static meshes, linked a bunch of stuff that felt like it needed linked to things? A lot of the work done was me clicking random things, figuring out what it does and deciding if it was necessary or not. (Probs not the best solution but, I did find a lot of functions lol)

I got the new backpack to show up when adding it into the GECK as a equippable. By itself, everything showed up in the render window the backpack, pickaxe, hatchet, bedroll, as a single item. The problem that got me to drop the mod was equipping it to a NPC, the backpack still showed up but all the additional pieces that I added did not. I couldn't quite get it fixed and chalked it up to inexperience. Now I would like to revisit this and hoped someone here could give a basic run-down of what functions are needed to make statics into equippable items? I would greatly appreciate it.

EDIT: I should mention that I still have the .blend file for the backpack at the exact point I stopped. If someone needs it so they can look over Ill happily make a link for it. I can also export it to .nif if need be so you can see what happens on the other end. 

Edited December 1, 2023 by DaleTheeMagnificent