Rather than using custom meshes for each unique piece of clothing, most of the variants added by Armor and Clothing Extension (and the aMidianBorn Content Addon, if you're visiting from there) work by applying a texture set to a vanilla mesh, with the texture set effectively overwriting the textures defined in the mesh with its own textures (see this article for more information on texture sets: Using Texture Sets for Skyrim).
In this article, we're going to be looking at the process of creating a CBBE patch for the Chainmail/Vigilant of Stendarr Robes added by ACE. Creating a patch could be done in either the Creation Kit or SSEEdit, but for the purpose of this article, we'll be using SSEEdit; accordingly, some familiarity with SSEEdit will be useful. We'll also be using NifSkope to open up the meshes and look at their internal structure.
As previously mentioned, most of the new armor and clothing items in ACE apply texture sets to vanilla meshes; in order for these texture sets to function properly, though, the correct fields in those items ArmorAddon (ARMA) records need to match the 3D Names and 3D Indices defined in the internal structure of the mesh. Consequently, if another mod (often a body replacer) supplies a replacement for the vanilla mesh which changes its internal structure (by changing 3D Names or adding/removing/rearranging 3D Indices/BSTriShapes), this can unfortunately "break" the texture sets.
In the screenshot below, the vanilla model is presented on the right and the CBBE replacer is on the left (although the images are overlapped so you won't see the CBBE replacer's 3D render). Note the vanilla model has 2 BSTriShapes, so it would have 2 different 3D index entries; you start counting from 0, so 3D Index "0" would have 3D Name "robes", and 3D Index "1" would have 3D Name "robes_skin". (You don't generally need to worry about skin when applying texture sets though).
The model from the CBBE replacer, on the other hand, has 4 different 3D index entries. The first, 3D Index "0", named "CBBE", is the skin, so you don't need to worry about that one. The remaining entries are:
"1", "robes"
"2", "Top"
"3", "Bottom_good"
Before patching these, you'll want to check the texture paths used by each BSTriShape in the replacer mesh, to determine what textures they should be using and whether or not you do need to patch it. In this instance, they're all using the same vanilla mage robe texture, so, presumably you'll want to swap them all out for the new texture added by ACE. An example where you might not need to patch a specifc 3D Index/BSTriShape could be an entry named "underwear" which uses some underwear textures not present in the original mesh.
Once you've identified what you need to patch, it's just a matter of using SSEEdit to replace the MO3S - Alternate Texture with your 3D index entries in the appropriate Armor Addon records. Here's a comparison of the Stendarr Robes Armor Addon record in ACE (left), along an example patch for the replacer on the right.
That's all there is to it!
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