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yes, either way is fine.

When working with meshes that use texture sets, it's particularly important to keep the shapes in the same order as the original mesh. If the position is not the same, then the texture swapping will not work and it will default to the original textures. If the first shape in the mesh is the robe on the original mesh, then it also needs to be the first shape after you do the refit.

usually it means the body is not placed at a high enough order in the mesh. Open nifskope and go to spells > sanitize > reorder block, then ctrl + click SAMBody in the BlockDetails window and press the up key to move it up above the other shapes. also, if the BSDecalplacementVectorExtraData isn't there for some reason it should be

SAM (at least the full version) works by swapping the textures based on the actor's values of samson and samuel. Skysight for example, only adds Samson50 and Samson75, meaning on a character with less than 50 samson you are not going to see anything different. You could get around this by playing with the names and using the textures you want for lower values, or as the default.

You should definitely expect that there will be differences between how it looks in outfit studio compared to how it will look in game on a moving character, especially on a character that big. There's not much you can do except to compensate for those differences in outfit studio by inflating the mesh even more. Or you can also hide parts of the body by deleting vertices or making zap sliders, whichever will work for you. For the second issue, I noticed that sometimes bodyslide will "forget" any adjustments made to the mesh if the reference is unset, and other times it will work fine. I really don't know why it happens, but I wrote a short workaround for that earlier in the thread. When I have the time I will probably just incorporate this workaround to the main guide to save some headaches.

i can't really tell what you've done wrong by looking at the original but anyway i'm a little confused - these are already refitted for SAM and it seems to work fine... what is it you're trying to do?

maybe using too recent a version of OS I think 4.6.1 or below is necessary, or something like that

upload one of the glove meshes and the tri file and I will take a look

I doubt there's any simple way to get the mod to replicate that texture swapping behavior (even SAM Light doesn't do it) But you could probably switch over to SAM Light and make use of SAM Morph's texture swapping option to be able to set your own normals for your character other than that I can't think of much.

can you send me these files you worked on in a PM? I will try to look at it and see what went wrong.

probably using latest racemenu and lacking hdt pe read through

You'd be able to tell if it's working or not, it's noticeable enough. Try testing when the character is nude.

not before starting a new game of course, but if you mean before starting Helgen, you could use a mod like Alternate Start to give yourself a chance to configure your MCMs before anything happens. IIRC, you won't notice any changes you made in the actors until after you get off the carriage because SAM holds off until then.

Are you using SAM Full or SAM Light? If you're using SAM Full then you can install SAM Morphs for RaceMenu. According to its description, if used with SAM Full, the samson and samuel sliders that it adds to racemenu will have an additive effect with the ones in SAM's MCM.