Blender and SWTOR Tips and Tricks

(WIP)

• Merging duplicate vertices to facilitate the use of Modifiers

  Some of the tips and tricks shown in this section involve the application of Modifiers: reversible, adjustable, stackable operations such as Displace, Solidify or Subdivision Surface (even a parented armature is handled as a Modifier). For them to work correctly, a Merge By Distance operation is required.

• Replacing body parts with gear vs. putting gear on top of body parts.

  When gearing a character with armor, SWTOR swaps the character body parts with the armor parts (if needed, they include regions where the skin material is applied to simulate a exposed part of the body). That suffices to reproduce our characters' looks, but we can go beyond that if, instead of swapping, we keep the body parts and put the gear on top. In this section we'll show you how to do it while avoiding clipping and other gotchas, and a few examples of the possibilities it gives us.

• Using the Subdivision Modifier to smooth out models' edges.

  SWTOR's objects have a relatively low polygon density. The Subdivision Modifier lets us smooth out their edges and make them look nicer.

• Eevee vs. Cycles.

  Blender's renderer engines have both their pros and cons. Both are valid for producing results. Here we look at a few details to take into account when choosing one or the other.

• Scaling models x10 to reach "real world" sizes.

  SWTOR's models have their polygon coordinates set in a range that goes from 0.0 to 1.0. Many features in 3D apps such as Blender (subsurface scattering shading, simulations, etc.) are meant to be applied to real world-sized objects, though.

• The trouble with Twi'lek.

  SWTOR's Twi'lek models show some peculiarities in their materials' textures and other details.

• Improving SWTOR's texture map files with Machine Learning-based upscalers.

  Nowadays using "Artificial Intelligence" makes the "Enhance!" image analysis Hollywood trope almost real. Improving games' texture map files with more resolution and sharpening has been a typical modding practice for decades, but the use of ML tools has brought that to new heights, and we can apply that to SWTOR. There are commercial upscalers around, such as the one in Photoshop, Topaz's standalone app, etc.) and free ones, be them web-based or open source software. Here there is a small guide on one of the latter:

  Enhancing SWTOR texture maps with Cupscale

• Going beyond SWTOR's materials' features.

  The SWTOR Slicers team has produced shaders and materials that replicate how SWTOR renders the game objects, but we can go beyond that and take advantage of the possibilities that 3D apps like Blender offer us: subsurface scattering for skin translucency, noise patterns for skin pore relief, cranking the Normals to accentuate muscle definition, cranking the emissiveness to make sabers' blades or glowy Sith eyes positively incandescent…

• Mixing and matching assets.

  We heard that your Body Type 1 character has an 8-pack, that they are shredded… by applying Body Type 3 textures to them.

• Rendering with alphas or in layers for easy further manipulation in art apps.

  We don't need to fully solve a shot in 3D. We can get the 3D part half-way there and then perfect it by compositing (making a digital collage of) it with other 3D and 2D elements and massaging the results into a whole.