Porting Oldrim mods to Special Edition
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This is how I port mods for my own use, and so far this has worked for me. I am by no means an expert, and I was not involved in making these tools in any way. I offer this guide from me to you, on a personal level, as if you were a friend. Basically, what I'm saying is "please don't get mad at me if this doesn't work for you". If you the guide is confusing, or you want help finding guides on how to use any modding tools (like xedit, zmerge, BAE archive extractor, Outfit Studio etc) please contact me, as I've used many over the years.

This will work for PC users, I don't have XBox or PlayStation, so I know nothing about modding for those platforms.

This technique will work for porting from LE, and for checking all meshes and textures from LE (and any SE mod as well - I personally run all my mods through Cathedral Asset Optimiser).

I don't have experience with scripts or SKSE plugins, and I've not tried to port anything that includes them, so I am not sure if this technique will successfully port those mod. I've used this mainly to port over player homes and armor/clothing mods.

I use Mod Organiser, which I highly recommend as being the best of all managers that I've tried. Its also really good if you're creating your own mods/ports/patches as its child's play to create mods with Mod Organiser. Check out the website here: https://www.modorganizer.org/ for all you could ever need to use MO.

CREATION KIT
So, to get Creation Kit for SSE you have to get the Bethesda launcher - you can download this from Bethesda.net. Both the website and the launcher are a clunky, slow nightmare - so its not you when you're trying to use them, its just how they are. Once you've installed the launcher, click on the games tab, then click on the little double arrows (>>) at the top of the sidebar bit. There
you can search for what you want - you are looking for SSE Creation Kit (it might also say 64bit Creation Kit). Click on it and download it. Choose a destination to download it to (I use my desktop because I'm lazy!). Copy the Creation Kit exe file (just the one exe file and nothing else) and paste it in the same folder where your Skyrim SE.exe is - it should be x/steam/steamapps/common/Skyrim Special Edition (with x being where you've installed your game files - incidentally this is best installed
in a completely different place than your program files - mine is on a separate hard drive).

If you are using MO (which I really cannot recommend enough) go to the dropdown on the right where your executables are, click the <Edit> bit at the top, click the little blue + button with a drop down, then choose "create an executable from file". Navigate to the Creation Kit.exe that you just put in the Skyrim SE folder and click. Now you should be able to launch Creation Kit from MO. (I'll be honest, for other mod organisers I think you just skip this step, but since I only use MO, I'm not 100% on that.)

Make sure that the mod from LE is installed the usual way through your mod manager. So, in MO you would enable it in the left pane, and tick the esp in the right pane. Now go and open CK via the executable you just set-up (you select it from the drop-down then click Run). CK will now launch. Its a nightmare and loads slowly, but you'll only need to do this once per esp. (For non-MO users, I guess you just open the CK by double-clicking the exe file, but like I said before, I'm not really sure).

When its finally finished opening, click on "Open". Now you'll see a list of your plug-ins, scroll until you find the esp you want. Click on it, then at the bottom of the window make sure you've ticked "Set as active file". Now click OK. CK will trundle off and open the esp, this can take a while by the way, again its the CK not you! When it says "Done" right at the bottom, just go and click the "Save" button. That's it, don't touch anything else. When its finished saving, close the CK.

You've now converted the esp for form 44 and it will work properly for SSE.



TO CONVERT MESHES AND TEXTURES
To ensure that meshes and textures are going to work in SSE, I use Cathedral Assets Optimiser. You can download this here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/23316
The instructions for using it are given on the mod's description page, and they're actually fairly straight forward. I recommend doing one mod at a time, until you know what you're doing. If you use MO, do not add this as an executable file - instead run it outside MO by double-clicking the exe file from the folder where you originally saved it.

Choose SSE from the "Profile" drop down at the very top. Next, choose from the drop down on the right: "one mod" (you can use the "several mods" option when you're more familiar with using it). Click "Open Directory" on the left. Navigate to the folder where the mod is, if you're using MO, then that will be in the folder you created when you installed MO. My file path looks like this:  Xdrive/steam/steamapps/commom/Skyrim Special Edition Mod Manager/mods. Select the mod's folder.

If the original mod has packed the assets into BSAs - use the BSA tab in the optimiser. Check the "unpack BSA" and the "create BSA" tick boxes. I also recommend ticking the "create the least BSAs as possible" box as well. You can also choose to compress the BSA by ticking that box. If the mod you are optimising has loose files don't worry about the BSA section.

Now go through the meshes and textures tabs. The "necessary optimisation" tick box should be checked on both. In the meshes tab, you can tick "medium optimisation" or "full optimisation" instead of necessary if you like (full description of what that means is in the Cathedral Assets Optimisation mod description). Also compress meshes and textures if you want (and resize them too) by selecting the relevent boxes. Tick the "process head parts" box and "resave meshes" in the meshes section as well. The Animations tab should have the "Necessary optimisation" box ticked.

Now click "Run" in the middle. This may take a bit of time depending on whether BSAs are being unpacked, how many files there are in total and rebuilding BSAs etc. It will tell you when its done at the bottom of the window. You can just close it when it is.



That is it. I know it seems like a lot, but I gave instructions with the assumption you know nothing. In reality this all takes about 20mins max. If the instructions on the Cathedral Assets Optimiser mod page differ from mine, trust their instructions over mine please.