I'm sure I'm not the first to have run into this problem, but as my searching turned up nothing useful, perhaps a new thread is in order.

I'm currently in the process of texturing work for my White Senches mod, but I've run into some trouble and near as I can tell it's endemic to any "custom" race. That being, equipment won't appear on a character unless one of two conditions are met. Either:
1. Under "Copy Details" in the CK race menu, one of the original races is selected for Armor Copy. Works fine for any races without custom skin data.
2. Every "ArmorAddon" piece equippable by a player character is modified to include the new race. Alternately, duplicates of all these are created for the specific race, but the parent Equipment (armor, clothing,etc) must then be modified to include the duplicates.

And therein lies the catch - at the moment it seems you can't create a race with a custom skin (Red Argonians, my White Senche khajiit, drow elves, etc) without creating a metric ton of extra "ArmorAddon" references to allow them to actually wear any equipment in-game. I say "seems" because I'm hoping this is just my own ignorance and not an actual issue, but my gut is telling me different.

Is there any way to create a custom-skinned race that doesn't involve causing massive compatibility issues with ArmorAddon refs? Or in a similar vein, is merging these references something Wrye Bash can handle, similar to the leveled lists? I still plan on going forward with the Senche mod but I hate going into it knowing it'll cause conflicts galore and still need compatibility tweaks for every new set of armor or clothing out there.

. . . so . . . no one else thinks this might be a problem?

It's hardly surprising nobody replies when you post a CK forum question in the mod forum?

Also there's a race armour field on the race form where you can specify another race which I assume yours will count as for armour settings. Try that.

Can't you do copy armor and overwrite it with a custom skin? Have you tried that?

Ok well I just tried that. I duplicated ArgonianRace, set the new one to use ArgonianRace armor but SkinNaked, saved it, looked at it in TESVSnip and it has no ARMO records only the new race and modifications...whats the issue?

That's "option #1" I already pointed out. It works fine if your race doesn't have custom body textures. But if you want those textures to show up in any other context, so far the only solution I've found is #2, which is why I'm concerned about potential conflicts. It shouldn't be necessary, but I've not found any other solutions yet.

It's possible I'm doing something wrong in that regard, of course. But my early solution of copying "Armor Race" as Khajiit resulted in the standard gray/cream Khajiit skin being used.

As for this being a CK issue... eh, you might be right, I'm not really sure. I posted it here because I was concerned about the potential for mod conflicts, but if it's just me being dumb and overlooking something in the CK (that isn't "Armor Race" copy data), then yeah it should probably get moved.

Requested move to CK forums: Anyone here have thoughts on the matter?

To be extra-clear, using "Armor Copy" in the race setup seems to copy the body-texture data for the base (copied) race as well, which becomes particularly obvious on things like Forsworn or Falmer armors. Am I simply missing some settings, or is there in fact no other way to correct that besides going through every ArmorAddon entry and tweaking it to account for the customized race / skin-texture data?

This sounds strange, as far as I know the skin texture on armor is just an placeholder and will be replaced with you actual texture, you don't have different armor models for different races unless you need it like Khajiit and Argonian helmets.
Your actual texture are also changed by complexity and other skin settings.

You are sure your texture is not set up wrong? like using an wrong name?

Kieve I already answered this... Duplicate Khajiits, name the new one SuperCats, set SuperCats to use Khajiits armor, there is a separate field for the skin... It's called "Skin" under the Body Data tab

No, you didn't. You did mediocre level testing and didn't read his post properly. This is a real issue that there is very little info about right now.

I too am having issues with this. I'm trying every combination of crap I can think of to prevent editing each armor directly, but so far I've had no luck. I either

a ) End up adding or modifying the original race that I am copying the "armor" of, or
b ) End up with a race that doesn't show any armor.

I'm still testing and what not, but if someone has an actual solution to this that'd be nice.