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GDC 2011 Cinematic Character Lighting in SWTOR

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ZeroGravitas edited this page Jul 25, 2023 · 2 revisions

This is a Game Developers Conference 2011 presentation by BioWare's Ben Cloward (Senior Technical Artist) and Aaron Otstott (Senior Software Engineer), where they describe the concept art-like, "stylized realism" that was set as a goal for SWTOR's graphic style, opposite to the usual aim for photorealism, and how it was achieved. They discuss the implementation via shaders and other methods of techniques such as gradient lighting, rim lighting, depth of field, automatic camera and light positioning, etc., several of which are being or have been implemented by the SWTOR Slicers team in tools like TORCommunity.com's Character Designer, Unreal and Blender shaders, etc.

The videorecording of the presentation is 59 minutes-long (48 minutes of actual presentation plus Q&A).

The slides can be downloaded as a PDF (22 MB).

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

IMPORTING SWTOR MODELS INTO BLENDER: A BRIEF OVERVIEW.
Check this intro first. Afterwards, you can jump directly to the guides on extracting PCs, NPCs and others.

TOOLS

No need to read this section right now: each extracting/assembling guide explains its required tools anyway.

Applications and Blender Add-on tools:

Online Tools:

Deprecated Tools:

  • EasyMYP (Windows app).
  • Noesis (Windows app).

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

READ THE BROAD STROKES FIRST: YOU'LL SEE IT'S EASIER THAN YOU THINK!

ASSEMBLING GAME LOCATIONS AUTOMATICALLY:

LOCATING AND ASSEMBLING ASSETS MANUALLY:

OTHER GUIDES (WIP):

MODDING (to do)

Modding isn't working at the moment due to SWTOR's change to a 64bit codebase. It's going to take a while 🙁.

DATAMINING (to do)

  • Overview.
  • Tools.

SWTOR TECHNICAL INFORMATION:

OTHER RESOURCES:

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