Game Update 7.6 broke our Character Assembler. We have a solution in Beta.

Depending on which resources folder is selected in the add-on's Preferences (extracted before or after Game Update 7.6), the tool gets the correct classic or modernized results. Check the release's description for details.

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO AUTO-EXTRACTING AND ASSEMBLING PLAYER CHARACTERS AND NPCs

We encourage you to read this guide's instructions without skipping any of them. They aren't difficult: It's just that outrunning them might lead to unnecessary stumbles.

As usual, if you meet any unsurmountable difficulties, you can join our Discord Server where we'll be best able to help you.

Tools to download and install:

• The ExtracTOR Windows app, which extracts all the assets from the game files.
• The free, open source Blender 3d app.
• Our SWTOR .gr2 Importer add-on for Blender. It's a .zip file. Don't decompress it: it's used as such .zip).
• Our ZG SWTOR Tools Add-on for Blender, also a .zip file.

Steps:

1. Installing the ExtracTOR app and extracting SWTOR's game assets:

   Before being able to work on a character, we need to have extracted the assets of the game and stored them somewhere in hand (it's a task we might repeat every time there is a big SWTOR game update). For that, we'll use our ExtracTOR app. The results of the extraction will fill about 90 GigaBytes of storage (they can be trimmed down to an extent afterwards).

2. Using TORCommunity's Character Designer to reproduce our character and their gear:

   There is an online tool, TORCommunity.com's Character Designer, that simulates both SWTOR's Character Creator screen and the Outfit Designer panel, allowing us to build our player characters with their gear in a 3D view quite faithful to the game's own. This tool is able to export (and import, too) a .zip file with information about the character.

   Then we decompress the .zip file and place the resulting folder wherever we like. It contains an empty hierarchy of subfolders and .json files (human-readable text files) describing what game assets (objects, textures, etc.) they should be filled with. We don't need to read it: our tools will do it for us.

   Please read this part of the guide before going to TORCommunity.com: it contains both a direct link to the tool's page and some necessary advice on its usage.

   …Or finding Non Playable Characters to auto-assemble, too!

   TORCommunity.com's database of NPCs leads to pages incorporating a little 3D Viewer. Once activated, it shows the 3D model of the NPC with a little diskette icon button that exports the same type of .zip file as the Character Designer. It only works with non-Creature-type NPCs (NPCs whose body parts can be replaced with armor): for Creature-type ones (typically single mesh), assembling has to be done manually for now, although it's fairly easy, and the file downloaded from TORC helps.

3. Using our ZG SWTOR Tools' Character Assembler to auto-assemble the model:

   Finally, we have Blender automagically find and assemble the assets through the use of our Character Assembler! By importing that .json file, the assembler will read the data, fill the subfolders with the required assets, and import and texture them all by itself.

Further possibilities

4. Rigging the character for posing and animation:

   As our importer add-on preserves the rigging information embedded in SWTOR's models (vertex groups and weight maps), our tools are able to import and apply the relevant armatures ("skeletons") automatically to rig the characters. That said, applying them manually is extremely easy, a couple of clicks away, so, it's something worth learning.

5. Applying SWTOR animations to the character:

   This should interest to those who only intend to produce static images, too. Not only it's a very simple process (select the skeleton, import the animation file, and that's it): it's the easiest way to find interesting poses and collect difficult to set ones for our characters, the same way we screencapture interesting frames from the game's cinematics.

   Also, there are other ways to get similar results, such as free online rigging and animating services like Mixamo, or those available for Blender itself.

   IMPORTANT: at this moment, our animations importer addon isn't yet compatible with the animation files of SWTOR 64 bit (Game Update 7.2.1 and above). That said, the ones from previous versions of the game do work, though. We keep them stashed in this GDrive.

6. Other sections follow: adding bones to clothes and lekku, even physics, auto-hooking weapons to hands, etc.

That's as far as player and non-player characters and armor gear is concerned. For other types of items (weapons, environments, architecture, etc.) we are reduced to manually locating them and their associated materials data. We are (slowly) filling this Wiki with guides about that.

So, let's go through the steps in detail:

NEXT PAGE: Installing ExtracTOR and extracting SWTOR's game assets