ZG SWTOR Baking Tools
A panel for tools that might help porting SWTOR models to other apps by baking SWTOR's complex materials to simpler, Principled BSDF shader-based ones (those are becoming a material interchange format, going from "of sorts" to an actual standard through industry initiatives).
At the moment we have not much to offer. A first step to make baking even possible at all is reverting to older SWTOR shaders that are friendlier to Blender's baking ways.
The SWTOR shaders from the modern version of the .gr2 Importer Add-on are quite faithful to the game's ones, but, to achieve that, they reproduce the way SWTOR calculates certain material attributes, such as specularity, which doesn't work well with Blender's baking workflow.
The older, "Legacy" versions of the shaders weren't as good, but happened to be more baking-friendly (they were based on the Principled BSDF shader or the Glossy one, which Blender favors for such tasks). So, we've included this simple converter: it converts materials in the Blender project that use any of the basic SWTOR shaders (Uber, Creature, Garment, SkinB, Eye, HairC), and also adds a texture map node (set as the Active node in the material), with a preloaded blank image, set to the resolution of the material's diffuse map. With such setup, one can just select, say, a character's objects, set the baking parameters, and launch a bake process. The resulting texture maps' names will appear with a "BAKED-" prefix in Blender's image select menus.
(This baking assist isn't much of an user-friendly solution, true. We are thinking of a more fully-featured one, but that is lots of work.)
It should be pointed out that this conversion works for any type of SWTOR objects using those basic six shaders, not just character ones. On the other hand, there are some other SWTOR shaders that we've added rather recently, such as AnimatedUV, that aren't covered yet.
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Objects with Modern .gr2 Add-on-based SWTOR materials.
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There's no need to use the deprecated Legacy .gr2 Add-on anymore. Its shaders are included inside this Add-on as a .blend project file to automatically copy them from. You can pick that file to give them a look and tinker with them, if you want to.
For some reason, Twi'lek eyes have their UVs outside the UV space's 0,0 to 1,1 coordinates region, lying between the 0,2 to 1,3 ones instead. This has no noticeable effect during normal use, but it seems to break the baking of the eye material when prepping the model for exporting to other apps and engines. This option moves the coordinates back to the 0,0 to 1,1 region.
Strictly speaking, it's a simple saver of image files. It can save all images sharing a piece of text in their names to a destination folder. If no common name text is selected, it'll save all images in the Blender project.