How can I make the mesh load into a t pose in nif skope to make it easier to skin?
Just out of curiosity, have you tried using the Character Tool (You probably want CTool2 if you're using FFvt3R) to Skin?
I do use character tool, but you cant change the background color. And it can be hard to see the skin because of certain animations
You can manually make a T pose by changing the values of the nodes, but that seems like a lot of work. You can zoom in/rotate/pan the camera in nifskope using the mouse wheel for zoom, click and drag for rotate, and the middle wheel button to pan the camera around.