State of Play August 2026

New:

TORC issues:

As many of you have realized, TORCommunity.com has been in an almost unusable state these last months: the site takes long to load or straight times out on us. If working, its Character Designer tool shows up but doesn't react to clicking on its start button.

Character Designer was the core of our SWTOR Player Characters auto-assembling tools. Without it we have to resort to tedious, manual work.

In these days of AI-assisted coding, Jedipedia is gaining features almost by the hour. One thing we have now is NPC JSON data export (check the export button in the NPCs pages' Appearance frame), and our Blender add-ons are compatible with them. For NPC auto-assembling, Jedipedia is now the preferred source of NPC JSON data, with the advantage of being up-to-date (TORC is forever frozen at Game Update 7.0).

Hopefully, we'll manage to grow some kind of Player Character data exporter (possibly via the PCS nodes viewer in Jedipedia's File Reader tool). Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, we'll try to add to this wiki clear instructions about how to assemble them manually as soon as possible.

Custom shaders showing up as black in 5.x:

The ZG SWTOR Tools's "custom shaders" (a variation of our shaders that make tinkering easier and also add some extras) used a trick for feeding normals to DirectionMaps in an almost circular way that 5.0 rejects (a noodle goes from the shader's output to the DirectionMap texturemap node's vector input), showing the material as black. It's been corrected for new conversions, but old projects need those circular noodles to be deleted.

About Blender versions, support, and related:

• We only "officially" support LTS (Long Time Support) versions of Blender for our tools : that is, Blender 3.6 LTS, 4.2 LTS, and 4.5 LTS, so far.

  5.2 LTS was released very recently. As 5.0 and 5.1 didn't break anything, hopefully 5.2 won't, either. We'll see.

  Before asking for help, make sure that you have them updated to their latest minor number versions (the version's third number. For example, 3.6.23 was the last 3.6.x ever released).

• If you are on 4.0.x or 4.1.x, see if you can move to 4.2 or higher, as those two series were extremely transitional and problematic. If you have to keep 3.6 around, make sure of using the last one: 3.6.23. Some early minor versions had a bug that broke our shaders.

Remember that you can have several Blender versions at once in your computer: they keep their settings and add-ons isolated from each other.