State of Play September 2026

New

TORCommunity .com is mostly dead 😐

Lately, TORCommunity.com has been constantly down, and, in the few occasions it's been up, its Character Designer tool hasn't been responsive enough to be workable.

This is a bit of a showstopper.

• Player Characters (PC):
  TORC's Character Designer tool was our most user-friendly means to replicate our SWTOR PCs and generate assets lists (the usual paths.json files) that our Blender tools can use, even if it was stuck in the SWTOR game update 7.0 era.

  There are two solutions to this:

  1. The next most user-friendly tool is fellow slicer jecand1mixer's JC SWTOR Tools Blender Add-on.

     It provides a PC Designer tool with sliders that replicate the game's Appearance Booth's ones, plus armor, dyes, and NPC importers. It's been recently updated to be up to date with the game's latest gear offerings.

     Its only limitation is that it has to run on Blender 3.6 LTS only. That's not that terrible an issue: we can install several Blender versions at once (I have seven, because reasons 😭), and each keeps its own preferences and add-ons. So, one could assemble a PC in 3.6.23 LTS, save the project, and open it or append it to a 4.5 LTS one.

     (Note that it requires to install the ZG SWTOR Tools and .gr2 Importer Add-ons, too)

  2. Then there's the manual route, using guides such as Understanding In-Game Head Slider Values, or learning to use Jedipedia's File Reader (Why Not Both™😏, et cetera).

• Non Player Characters (NPC):
  Fortunately, the NPC situation is mostly solved: through Jedipedia.net.

  Fellow slicer Crunch, with the guidance of C-3PO (Jedipedia.net's owner), has been working on improving the site's export features. We now have, in Jedipedia's NPCs pages, a button in their Appearance panels (next to its "3D Model Viewer" title) that exports JSON data in the same format that TORC used for exporting PCs and NPCs.

  The ZG SWTOR Tools and .gr2 Import Add-ons have been updated to accept these Jedipedia JSON files, too. Please download their latest versions.

We know that we will need a better Player Character export and assembling solution, able to keep pace with the game's updates. Crunch is working on revamping and consolidating our importers. A PC designer and exporter tool should follow.

Custom shaders showing up as black in Blender 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 opened in 5.x 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. It didn't seem to break anything.

  Before asking for help, make sure that the versions you use have been updated to their latest minor number versions (the version's third number. For example, 3.6.23 is the last 3.6.x ever released. Some early minor versions had a bug that broke our shaders.

• 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 (the bug that broke our shaders reappeared in 4.1).

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