ZG SWTOR Character Tools - SWTOR-Slicers/WikiPedia GitHub Wiki

This panel holds the SWTOR Character Assembler and related tools.

Character Assembler.

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This tool combines the functionality of the Slicers GUI Tool's Locate feature and the .gr2 Importer Add-on's Character Importer as an automated one-button process.

(It also exists as a stand-alone Add-on: the SWTOR Character Assembler)

Requirements.

  • A SWTOR assets extraction performed via Slicers GUI (with either the "Dynamic" or "All" presets) or EasyMYP. This Add-on can work with assets from both the deprecated 32 bit version of SWTOR or the current 64 bit one.

  • TORCommunity.com's Character Designer-exported description folders, or non-Creature-type NPCs ones exported from its NPC database.

  • THERE'S NO LONGER THE NEED TO PROCESS THE FOLDERS WITH SLICERS GUI'S LOCATE FEATURE. It's the point of this new tool 🙂.

Features.

The Character Assembler:

  • Fills a Player Character/NPC's description folder (exported by TORCommunity.com's Character Designer or the NPC database) with all the game assets required for assembling them in Blender.

    It gathers the character or NPC's skeleton rig, too, saving it inside a "skeleton" folder next to "models" and "materials".

    It solves some long lingering issues, such as placing the typically missing "black.dds" texture map in our SWTOR asset extractions if detected as missing.

    It also gathers some maps that weren't being covered by Slicers GUI:

    • DirectionMaps, that can be used by the Creature, SkinB, and HairC Shaders to produce anisotropic-like speculars.

    • WrinklesMaps, meant to be used in heads' SkinB Shaders to animate facial wrinkles. Our version of SWTOR's skin shader for Blender doesn't support them yet, but some experiments are being carried in order to implement their use).

  • Under the hood, the tool calls Darth Atroxa's .gr2 Importer Add-on's Character Import feature to assemble the character. It should be pointed out that this means this tool has the same limitations regarding Creature-type (single mesh) NPCs.

  • It adds a series of "quality of life" options to the process, such as collecting armor parts by their in-game names.

  • It reports its progress and errors through Blender's Console. It is recommended to keep it open to check for any error message, as it lists all the files it detects and copies, showing if any entry is malformed or leads to a missing file.

Limitations.

  • The old limitation of requiring setting a 'resources' folder even if a character's assets were already collected in some previous session has been eliminated. That said, this means that any missing asset (objects, textures, or material definition files) will produce an error and cancel the importing process. Typically, it shouldn't happen to characters previously imported with this tool. If it does, the solution is, of course, to set the 'resources' folder to let it gather the missing elements, or get them and put them manually into the character's relevant subfolders).

Importing options.

  • Gather Assets Only: it only locates and copies the asset files to the character folder, without importing them.

  • Don't Overwrite Assets: if an asset already exists in the folder, it preserves it instead of overwriting it. Useful if the files in the folder have been modified in some manner, such as retouching a texture, without changing the name (you should change the name when doing something like that, though, to avoid the risk of an accidental overwrite).

  • Collect By In-Game Name: it places each armor part's objects inside a Collection named after the armor's in-game name (say, "Canderous Ordo's Vest"). It does that by finding a presets.json file inside the character's folder. If unchecked, it just places all the objects in a common Collection.

  • Import Armor Gear Only: discards the non armored body parts, expediting the creation of multiple sets of armor for a same character (take into account that there is armor that includes skin materials to simulate areas where the skin is exposed: those are considered armor gear, too).

  • Import Rigging Skeleton: imports the character's skeleton, without binding the character's objects to it unless we tick the next option:

  • Bind Objects To Skeleton: binds the character's objects to the imported skeleton.

Typical result of a character import with the default settings:

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About multiple importings in a same Blender project.

As the text following the options checkboxes points out, it is advisable to rename the imported character's objects and materials (and the Collections they are in, too) in some fashion, as that will allow for importing more characters or armor gear sets in the same project while avoiding naming conflicts (the .gr2 Importer Add-on which is doing the heavy lifting underneath doesn't cater to those, so, it's something we have to take care for by ourselves).

If we keep a single import result per Blender project, this renaming isn't strictly necessary for combining already imported characters in a new scene: Blender, when combining assets (via appending, linking, or its Asset catalog equivalents), uses ".00x" suffixes to avoid naming conflicts. Of course, the result of that is rather untidy, so, it's still convenient to rename things.

For that, there is the Item Names Prefixer tool:

Item Names Prefixer.

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Requirements.

  • A selection of items, which can include Collections, be it in the 3D View or the Outliner.

It allows for adding a prefix to any item selected in the 3D View or in the Outliner (where we can select and prefix Collections, too). What's more, it's smart enough to prefix any selected object's materials and skeletons' inner data-blocks without needing to explicitly select them.

The motivation behind those specific features is to apply them to SWTOR character imports done by the Character Assembler tool. That lets us make all their names unique enough to be able to do several imports in a same Blender project (for example, different sets of armor) without making an utter mess of their objects and, especially, of their materials.

Don't forget: for multiple character imports, Collections must be renamed too, or the results of successive imports will end up disorganized.

(If our renaming needs are more complex than simple prefixing, then it's Blender's own Batch Renaming tool's turn)