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

[RealymanLP]

New hashlist for PTS 3.6 #2: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

[ZeroGravitas]

UPDATED Jul 2022:
For any visitor finding this thread and being interested in extracting and assembling their SWTOR player characters, this is the state of play regarding SWTOR's assets extraction and assembling :

The needed tools have been reduced to mostly four:

• TORCommunity.com's online Character Designer, for recreating our Player Characters and exporting a description of the required game assets and an empty folder structure where to place them.
  
  (Alternatively, TORCommunity.com's database of NPCs, which can export the same information for NPCs (companions, other characters, and creatures).

• Slicers GUI: an unified tool for extracting game assets, examining the game's data, modding and, as it concerns this post, processing those Player Character and NPC exports to locate their assets and fill their folder structures with them. This tool replaces the old EasyMYP and Noesis ones, which are no longer necessary (they are still available at the same Github repository, as they can be useful as file inspectors).

• Blender, the popular free, open source 3D app.

• The SWTOR Granny2 import/export add-on for Blender. This add-on reads the folder processed by Slicers GUI and auto-assembles and textures the character with materials that replicate the game's looks IN ONE CLICK. It's also capable of importing the character's rigging information, character skeleton objects, plain import multiple game objects in one go, and import and apply game animations!

The whole process is explained in this wiki. There are also guides on how to rig characters (in literally three clicks or so), find weapons (not so automated yet but fairly easy) and hook them to the characters, and how to improve upon the game models through Blender's features (SDS for smoothing their skins, using full bodies underneath their armor, etc.).

Even if these guides and tools are Blender-centric, there are ways to export the PCs and NPCs to other platforms such as Unreal, VRChat, etc. The guides are rather lacking on those at the moment.

As this thread is in a bit of a state of hibernation, most of the activity regarding all this and other sides of SWTOR datamining is happening at the SWTOR Slicers Discord Server. There, you can find people, including some Xentax old-timers , producing additional tools, guides, art, etc. to ask questions to.

[Boda]

Hey, I'm looking for an active invite link into the discord. Is there any way someone can provide one? I have several questions and it seems like it'd be easier to communicate that way.

[ZeroGravitas]

Hey, I'm looking for an active invite link into the discord. Is there any way someone can provide one? I have several questions and it seems like it'd be easier to communicate that way.

Sure . Here you are:
https://discord.gg/XfHFjSN

[ZeroGravitas]

Update for any visitor finding this thread:

Things have become far easier since the last time we posted about the progress in extracting, modding, and datamining SWTOR. Basically, everything is being put under the umbrella of a single multipurpose app.

Now it is possible to autoassemble fully textured player characters and NPCs in almost one click through the latest versions of the importer add-on for Blender. The models preserve their rigging information so that, when paired with a skeleton object, they become posable and animatable. An experimental animation importer allows for some of the game animations to be applied.

Also, there's an effort to turn modding into an easy, colaborative endeavor, allowing for the sharing of recipes.

To learn more, please visit the related Github's wiki, at https://github.com/SWTOR-Slicers/WikiPedia/wiki

[DaarthYceyy]

I've seen a lot of information in this forum about extracting and assembling character models, but has anyone figured out yet how to reproduce an area map? The player ships have skeletons that assemble all the room objects correctly, but I've yet to find anything similar that would piece together an area -- like Nar Shaddaa or Coruscant -- for example. The terrain maps are probably not able to be reproduced, but I'm hoping there's a way to at least assemble the architecture of an area, similar to how a skeleton does for the player ships. Importing individual meshes and trying to assemble the pieces by hand isn't worth the effort.

[ZeroGravitas]

There's a private tool in use by some dataminers that is able to load and navigate whole SWTOR locales, and there's the intention to develop a public one, although right now other projects are taking precedence.

(You can see the private tool in action here: https://youtu.be/Wa8q6gAj6hM?list=PL0H7 ... msR&t=1986 )

[ZeroGravitas]

I've updated the post describing the current state of play regarding game characters extraction and assembling to reflect the latest advances .

[ZeroGravitas]

Minor update: the team is still active at the SWTOR Slicers Discord. Tools are being updated for SWTOR 64 bit compatibility (assets extraction and object import are working already), and we have a fairly functional game locations assembler addon for Blender (working on having it import heightmap-based terrain, too).

Also, guides: at https://github.com/SWTOR-Slicers/WikiPedia/wiki