How do I remove parts of existing armor

[cars]

Hi all Im trying to remove sections of the dragonscale light armor armor, namely the black leathery scaley part underlaying the dragonbone plates.

 

Using nifskope with the new .xml, I tried exporting the .nif into .obj and editing them in Blender then converting the .obj back into nif,but that hasnt worked. I would get a giant red !. I think the error is caused by the lost of the ninode and nitrishape tree files during conversion.

 

I tried editing the .nif directly in nifskope by deleting branches in BSDismemberSkinInstances, but that causes the model to warp and the game to crash completely when I try to load the save. Editing the UV in nifskope doesnt seem to do anything but cause a part of the armor with the missing UV wire thing to suck in texture from another part of the armor.

 

I also tried making the texture transparent by blacking out parts of its alpha channel in PS but the dragonscale armor texture doesnt have alpha channel.

 

 

Is there some special setting in nifskope or plugins I should be using?