Hide armor and other skirts

[Doomspell 0]

Looking for a bit of help in this area. Ive noticed that the Hide armor and some other 'skirted' armor like Imperial Light, has clipping in the knees, happens with or without the SAM vanilla refits. The NPCs legs come through the skirt when NPCs are walking up stairs or uphill, basically doing anything with lots of knee bend action. The leather studded armor does not do this, the skirt moves with the players legs, even at high bends, can have one leg planted a step higher, and none of the leg pokes through. Wondering how to remedy something like this without having to increase the size of the hide skirts (to eliminate the clipping you basically have to turn your skirt into a hot air balloon of puffiness.) Id like to learn how one makes armor move more reliably with the body. Females do not have this issue when wearing the same armor, the hide skirts bend properly with the knees. Drives me nuts, hope its something that someone can shed light on. As far as I know, SAM does not introduce new walking animations, I see no rhyme or reason for the legs to be coming through all these armors... maybe this is default vanilla behavior that I always overlooked/missed on these armors until now. Hmmm... and after trying to compare every little detail of the the Studded vs Hide armors nif files, I cannot seem to discover what gives some armors the ability to bend at the knees better. I have a feeling it is something to do with bone weights. Perhaps HDT is causing the weights on the skirts to behave differently. Next thing I will try is to remove or heavily soften the bone weights on the skirt, see if it helps.

[brassknuckles 3]

I believe this is a vanilla issue, and is because of the rigging of the armor. Either the skirt bone or the leg bone should be what that part is rigged to. Wolf Armor (from the companions questline) has the same issue, I believe.

[Doomspell 0]

Seeing that the Hide armor skirts have like 6-10 bones for the skirt, wonder how I can tell them to move more with the legs. Gonna try comparing male hide to female hide, cuz females walk upstairs and everything bends all proper.

[Doomspell 0]

Well, couples big differences I noticed between the male and female hide. The bone weights for the female version are like red hot on the skirt, whereas the males skirt is all blue and green. Also the female hide armor has 2 seperate body_32 partitions. Has a seperate partition for the skirt. Whereas the male version is just a single body_32 that covers the entire armor mesh. Somewhere herein lies the problem methinks. Wish I knew more about bones and rigging. I can sure as heck sniff out problems and even the causes of problems, but sometimes the solutions escape me. This is why it takes team work to make the dream work I suppose.