Star Wars - The Old Republic - Beta

[swtorastic88]

I'm just starting on this, and have no experience, so it's been interesting, lol. It was a struggle, but I have managed to get the meshes and textures from the assets. Now I just have to figure out how to get and apply those textures (i am guessing GIMP since i refuse to pay for photoshop sub and looks like dds doesn't work with photoshop 5.5).

Oh! one question I do have... if we don't use dds file format for textures, what is a "common" format to use?

After that, I guess it's time to learn how to rig in blender.

Anyway, I wanted to post a thanks to those who create the programs that help extract things, and to the explanations people provide. Thanks.

[ZeroGravitas]

I'd encourage you to join the Discord server where most of the people active in this forum chat and exchange information. We can lend you a hand there .

https://discord.gg/Rap3KjXm

Regarding the texture files: Blender directly accepts those .dds files, and all the image channels' shenanigans (like turning "green" normal maps into "blue" conventional ones, or isolating the opacity channel) can be solved directly there, without needing to go through a paint app. If you want to go further and, say, repaint them, you could convert them to .png which is a fairly typical format for these things (most formats would do, really: tga, jpg… It mostly depends on whether you need to preserve the alpha channel or not). There are free batch-converters around, such as Noesis, XnConvert, etc.

DarthAtroxa's .gr2 importer addon for Blender provides with a replica of SWTOR's materials system, so that you just plug the texture files and some values into them and they give you results faithful to the game. Those aside, I built a kind of approximation to them that might be a bit more artist-friendly. There's people creating better tools that one day might automate most of this stuff.

And regarding rigging, you might be able to skip its rigors, actually . DarthAtroxa's addon is able to import the game's armatures and the objects' matching vertex groups, so it's just a matter of parenting the objects to the armatures with the deformations option and you can immediately start posing them! It's not as fully featured and user-friendly a system as Blender's own tools can provide (no drivers or IK… although one could add them to it), but it is what the game uses, including weight map-driven limb deformations and everything.

[seedhartha]

Hi!

I've decided to share with you the progress I'm making on reverse-engineering JBA animations:

https://github.com/seedhartha/reone/wiki/SWTOR-Research

I think the file layout is pretty accurate, but we still have to figure out the exact format and ordering of keyframes. If someone here could give direction, I would be very grateful.

[ZeroGravitas]

Hi!

I've decided to share with you the progress I'm making on reverse-engineering JBA animations:

https://github.com/seedhartha/reone/wiki/SWTOR-Research

I think the file layout is pretty accurate, but we still have to figure out the exact format and ordering of keyframes. If someone here could give direction, I would be very grateful.

Thank you! Would you be interested in joining the SWTOR Extraction/Modding/Datamining Discord server? It's where most of the activity of this thread is being carried on, nowadays, and there are several fellow coders there that for sure would like to study your analysis and maybe lend a hand.

The link is: https://discord.gg/Rap3KjXm

[seedhartha]

Thank you! Would you be interested in joining the SWTOR Extraction/Modding/Datamining Discord server? It's where most of the activity of this thread is being carried on, nowadays, and there are several fellow coders there that for sure would like to study your analysis and maybe lend a hand.

The link is: https://discord.gg/Rap3KjXm

Gladly! Your link has expired, though.

[ZeroGravitas]

Aw, sorry. Try this one: https://discord.gg/XfHFjSN