JC's Lightsaber Visual Effects for K2 1.5

   (3 reviews)

14 Screenshots

About This File

Summary

This mod replaces the lightsaber blade textures. I've made new textures using Saber, a plug-in for After Effects made by visual effect artists who work on the actual films, which they released for free on VideoCopilot.net. The new textures are of higher quality (1024x1024 vs the original 128x128) and should be more accurate to the movie look, given that they were generated with a tool made by movie people.

I've adjusted some of the blade colors; I mainly used math to choose them, placing them at even distributions along the color spectrum, and sticking with the plug-in's default setting for blue. In more practical terms, this means yellow is a bit yellower, while green and violet are closer to the blue end. Blue itself is much brighter than the original. Orange and cyan are no longer reused copies of the Heart of the Guardian and Mantle of the Force colors from K1. They both look more like standard lightsaber blades. Orange's blade color falls exactly between red and yellow - you know, actually orange. Cyan and viridian are evenly placed between blue and green. Silver uses the same color settings as blue, but at 33% saturation. I've added an alternate optional texture to have the viridian blade more closely resemble the original, if you would prefer.

 

Video Preview

 

Installation

  1. Extract files from the downloaded archive.
  2. Copy the files from Override to your own Override folder (if you don't have one, make one).
  3. Optionally, copy whatever files you want to use from the Alternate Textures folder to your Override folder, replacing the previously-installed files.
  4. If you use the Ultimate Saber Mod, copy the files from the USM New Colors folder to your Override folder. This gives all colors added in USM the same upgrade for visual consistency.

 

Uninstallation

  1. Remove the installed files.

 

Compatibility

This mod should be compatible with any mods that add or alter lightsaber hilts, assuming the use the orginal game textures for the blades.

This mod is not compatible with other mods that alter the lightsaber blade textures, including my own past mods.

 

Credits

KOTOR Tool – Fred Tetra
Saber – Andrew Kramer & VideoCopilot.net
tga2tpc – ndix UR

 

Permissions

I hereby grant nobody except myself permission to upload some or all of this mod anywhere for any reason. For any reason.

If you would like to include any part of this mod in anything, then please contact me for permission.

 

Disclaimers

IT'S SO DENSE, EVERY SINGLE IMAGE HAS SO MANY THINGS GOING ON...

 

Donations

If you enjoy my mods and would like to show your support in a monetary manner, you may do so via PayPal with this donation link.

For various legal and ethical reasons, this is entirely optional and is not a requirement to downloading or using any of my mods. I also do not create specific mods for hire.

I make mods as a hobby and will most likely do so regardless of any donations or lack thereof, but modding does take up a lot of my time and every bit helps.


What's New in Version 1.5   See changelog

Released

  • Added alternate texture options for green and blue.
  • Converted all textures from TGA/TXI to superior TPC format.
  • Like 5
  • Thanks 1
  • Light Side Points 1



User Feedback

Recommended Comments

Is it possible to install a part of the mod only and not the whole of it?Your new viridian blad doesn't look like the old viridian color,not even close(imo) thus,I would really like to keep the old color,if this is possible in this mod.If it is,what file do I need not to install? The rest of the colors looks just fine.In overall,this is well made mod,well done.

 

 

Thanks in advance.

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I might finally replace my blades from Marius Fett's color pack, these look really nice!

I'm going to have to take a look at the green in game though, I'm more of a fan of a lime green color than just standard green.

Are the blades animated though? Do they flicker slightly?

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Ye,they do but very slightly,unless I do not see well! I have tested Marius Fett's lightsaber blad mod,too,I usually use his mod,just wanted to test sth new and it happen to be yours.It would be very nice if you combine your mod with his,the results would be awesome!!

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1 hour ago, Terrorix said:

Is it possible to install a part of the mod only and not the whole of it?Your new viridian blad doesn't look like the old viridian color,not even close(imo) thus,I would really like to keep the old color,if this is possible in this mod.If it is,what file do I need not to install?

Yes, if you don't want to use any particular color, you can remove the TGA and TXI files associated with it. My new viridian doesn't look like the original because the original didn't look anything like the color viridian. If you don't want to use that, you can remove the files w_lsabreDgrn01.tga & w_lsabreDgrn01.txi. However, I would suggest instead that you use the alternate texture option I just added. :)

31 minutes ago, Untold Prophecy said:

I'm going to have to take a look at the green in game though, I'm more of a fan of a lime green color than just standard green.

If you have Photoshop or Gimp or some similar editor, it should be easy enough to do a subtle change like that with the Hue/Saturation tool. I understand what you mean - the original green saber from Return of the Jedi is much yellower than the prequel sabers or Luke's saber in The Last Jedi. I went with that look given that it's the more recent look and it makes it more distinct from yellow, but if you want to change it, I won't stop you.

34 minutes ago, Untold Prophecy said:

Are the blades animated though? Do they flicker slightly? 

They don't animate because the size would be ridiculous. My textures are 1024x1024, and then multiply that by the number of keyframes. And I believe we're limited to 4096x4096 in any case.

That, and I've never been happy with any animated lightsaber blade mod and I didn't expect I could do a better job. I'm exploring other options, but they would require edits to the model rather than to the lightsaber texture.

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On 7/30/2018 at 11:14 PM, JCarter426 said:

τhey don't animate because the size would be ridiculous. My textures are 1024x1024, and then multiply that by the number of keyframes. And I believe we're limited to 4096x4096 in any case.

Perhaps I didn't looked carefully,but I still think they flicker slightly. Anyway,that was not the case.Thanks for your asnwer

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1 minute ago, Terrorix said:

Perhaps I didn't looked carefully,but I still think they flicker slightly. Anyway,that was not the case.Thanks for your asnwer

All lightsabers have a bit of flicker if Frame Buffer Effects are turned on. However, certain other mods have animated the lightsaber textures themselves, which give it a more extreme effect. My feeling is that isn't an ideal way to do this - if there aren't enough animation frames, it will have too much stutter. And given the size of my textures the number of possible frames would certainly be limited, so I didn't animate the textures.

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On 3/10/2019 at 5:11 PM, cegi85 said:

Can you do thet for TSL Longsabers mod.

It should already be compatible with other lightsaber mods so long as they don't also edit the blade textures.

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Thank you very much for your well done mod JCarter426. : ) Finally, a lightsaber mod that changes the color viridian to an actual color like viridian.

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I don't recall - I don't have it installed at the moment. I've added them as a preemptive measure in the event that some anonymous individual releases a TSLRCM-compatible version of USM, which is most assuredly only a hypothetical and not something that was unexpectedly delayed due to mysterious circumstances.

So, uh, you should wait until the hypothetical release of that, I guess.

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Hey JC, would you be willing to update the blades with an optional flicker or pulse? These look gorgeous, but they're missing some sort of animation like what you'd see in other versions or in the films. Kind of like what you see here:

Update: I didn't realize I had commented here back in 2018, lol. Finally saw your follow up response on texture sizes and model editing. My bad, man! If you do ever end up doing another version though, or overcome the size limitations for the file, I'll leave this up as I think the gifs are good references for blade animations.

8324c00645e8cb8954121b99c43ac2114acff45729c94b95c9eda00318b29ccdca99561f11c9df67

Edited by Untold Prophecy

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I don't know of any issue, but it's possible. I would suggest removing any blade textures from that mod (anything starting with "w_lsabre"). If that doesn't fix the problem, I can maybe try to look at those specific hilt models, but we'll see.

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Hello. I'm new to modding. When you say to create my own override folder, where do I place this folder? Inside of the default folder? Can I rename my new override folder? I could really use some help here. No other saber colors mod gets purple right.

I installed this and my blades look like Illustrious_Foxx's photo above. I have no blade or hilt mods. My mods are Steam Workshop TSLRCM, Steam Workshop Ultimate Character Overhaul Redux, and non steam tweaks like two thorium charges or just cosmetic changes to stuff. What is happening? Did I place my override folder in the wrong spot? Does it need to be at the top of the list? PLEASE HELP ME! Your saber mod is literally the only good one out there!

I figured it out! This mod is awesome!!!!!

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I was able to manually install this on the new IOS version of KOTOR 2.  It looks amazing, and so far I have not encountered any bugs. 

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Are you taking random feedback? I think your decision to let math decide the color creates less than perfect colors. You can see what a little bit of artistry can do - Viridian is incredible. 

I think the bronze and gold are too similar, and redundant. The old gold was cool as it was a more muted color, kinda how viridian is more subtle than green. And the old yellow was absolutely perfect, very pretty. But that's just me. I think, since the two oranges are almost the same, there's maybe room for the old yellow. But i'm just nitpicking, preem mod.

Edited by freemanendelay

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Thank you for this mod! The upgraded lightsaber blades look good, and the possibility to choose alternate textures for certain colors is even more so. For my last TSL game I chose the alternates for all three offered colors. I had aesthetic preferences for the alternate blue and green blade textures, plus I also thought the deep blue blade would stand better against the cyan blade, and the alternate green against the new "proper" viridian blade.

I chose the alternate "pseudo-viridian" blade over the "correct" one for a wholly different reason. In the game, I wanted to copy the lightsaber build of my favorite Star Wars character, Ahsoka Tano. And the original "viridian" color looked the most similar to the yellow-green blade of Ahsoka's short lightsaber from The Clone Wars seasons 3-5. Of course, it's not exact, as can be seen below:

Spoiler

A woman in Zeison Sha armor dual-wields a standard green lightsaber and a short "viridian" lightsaber.
Source: KotOR 2: The Sith Lords via Discord

For comparison: Image of Ahsoka Tano with both lightsabers from TCW episode "Overlords", via Wookieepedia.

I've wondered if it is possible to add a proper yellow-green color crystal to match Ahsoka's short lightsaber from TCW. I see one of your mods for the first KotOR adds more saber colors, all except one of them backported from TSL, so I assume introducing an additional blade color to TSL (as well as K1) won't be too problematic - well, except perhaps for designing the crystal and saber icons, as well as adding the appropriate line to a certain early game dialogue with Atton. I'll understand if you can't do this, but if you can and if you do, I hopefully won't be the only one to appreciate such an addition. :) Thanks in advance!

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