I have been spending all day trying to apply some of the effects my npc uses onto her meshes inherently. The first step I wanted to take was to make her invisible without the use of a setalpha script, since my users report at times it never goes off... this is a problem! Unfortunately, I've uncovered far more problems trying to overcome that one as I've gotten in way over my head.

So here's what I tried to do: First I made a mostly see-through .dds file. I colored the rgb channel pure black, and then set the alpha channel to basically 1% value, but that wasn't enough. In order to get the body meshes to accept the transparent alpha, I had to go into nifskope and give them an alpha property. At this point I'm already completely confused, but just acting out of a bit of advice and mostly experimentation.

So, here's how she is supposed to look: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/36188//?

In general, the colorful shaders fill in the mesh from the inside, and the black shader expands from the outside of the mesh. the outline is only visible on the parts of the body closest to you, despite being see-through, you can't see the outline of her ass from the front.

Now this is what she looks like after all my experimentation: http://i.imgur.com/oubhkUU.jpg

This actually looks quite a bit better than it is. In general the color and color shaders are blending together with out any regard at all for the mesh. As you can see, the entire outline is visible at all times, and the particle shaders seem to now be concerned with each mesh (head/body/feet/etc) separately instead of uniformly. This is all sorts of unsettling.

I guess it's about time I start asking questions:

Is there some magical nifskope alpha flag setting, .dds file appearance, map appearance, or shader property that will solve all my problems?

The only way I've found to make some particle shaders preferred over others is to make some of them always shown on the z-test, which makes them visible through walls. Is there a better way?

Am I coming at this from ENTIRELY the wrong angle? Is there another way I can make the character inherently see-through without this hassle and without a script to set the alpha?

What's so magical about the ingame actor alpha setting? why does it behave so perfectly and yet making the textures alphas see-through produce a COMPLETELY different outcome?

I guess I'm just desperate after working on this all day long and ending up one step forward and two steps back. I apologize for the wall of text.