Mesh modding help needed

[HavocBlast]

I'm new to this kind of editing and it seems I'm no good at it, but 'd like to make a tiny mod: I find the male version of the shrouded cowl to be quite repugnant, so I thought I'd add the cool mask from the female version to it, yet the male cowl comes with some sort of small cape, so if I try to have men simply using the female one, the pieces won't fit. I've exported the data via the Fall Out 3 Mod Manager and tried to use NifSkope to merge the 2 items, but they wouldn't (I think it's because they're both made of one single piece and have no selectable parts to copy). So I tried to reshape the female cowl to fit the male armour by manually copying the data from those vertices, but I failed again! I can't have NifSkope understand those aren't supposed to be bogus bits to get rid of, but they should help reshaping the cowl. How do I link them to the pre-existing parts? Also, I figured, should I succed, I'd need Blender to re-texture the new item, but so far it won't recognise any file extention at all... why's that? I've tried .nif, .dds and .bsa, but all the folders containing them would appear empty in the Blender menus. Should I be doing this in entirely diferent way? Edited June 11, 2012 by HavocBlast