So i'm new to mod merging and thought id try, long story short, it seems a lot of the armors or weapons I merged appear invisible in game. for example my witch plate I was wearing was rendered invisible but it still gave me exposure protection when I equipped it.

anyways I may have bitten off more than I can chew, I tried to combine 20-30 armor and weapon mods that were standalone and not requiring patches. but maybe that's too big. Any advice?

Maybe put all crossbows together in one and female armors in another

Just looking for help Edit: I guess what I'm asking is what should a merge and what shouldnt I? and at what quantity at a time?

I suspect you haven't extracted and merged the bsa's for the mods. Since the merged esp has a single name, it needs a single matching bsa to find the meshes and textures. You can also leave them as loose files, and not put them back in a bsa at all, but they can't be found in the original archives.

I fixed the mods by just installing the mods again, next time when I merge, gonna use smaller groups, create the esp, then unpack the files for those mods into another folder and create a zip, see if that works. gonna start with my crossbow mods to start and see where that goes