DarthParametric

The bottom row of neck verts is weighted 100% to necklwr_g,. Even if I scaled up the eye texture to 512x512 (which is hilarious levels of overkill given the whole face texture is only that big), there'd still be a whole quarter of the texture empty. I'm not opposed to large textures. Hell, my droid textures are all 4096x4096. But it just seemed stupid. There'd be more wiggle room on, say, a Twi'lek, which would require a 3rd map for the lekku, or a male character with a beard, which again would require another map. In that case, yeah, I'd probably just tack the 256x256 eye texture on and live with the dead space (assuming there wasn't sufficient free room somewhere. This is also all under the proviso that the remapping is (aside from the eyes) strictly only compressing U and repositioning V for rectangular texture combinations, or otherwise just scaling 0.5x0.5 for a 4x4 combo. If you wanted to completely rearrange the UVs then no doubt you could slip the eyes in without losing any pixel density, but that seems like a hell of a lot more trouble than it is worth, At least this way (mostly) retains compatibility with the source textures besides a little repositioning.

In this case, yeah, I just started from a unskinned mesh. Which was useful anyway as I could weld together some seams that were a bit nasty. Although I did save out the original skin weights, and bake a copy with the skin utilities. I was originally going to try a weight transfer to the KOTOR rig, but the last time I tried that it didn't turn out so hot, so I figured I'd just skip straight to a skin wrap of a vanilla head. It also allowed me to split out the eyes, teeth, and tongue meshes without trying to deal with it all as one mesh while trying to transfer weights, which is a nightmare with how many verts and overlapping polys they have crammed in their gob. The original face and hair textures are both 512x512. so I just put them side-by-side in a 1024x512 map. There really wasn't any way to sanely tack on the eye texture that didn't result in a ton of wasted space (and make the eye texture ridiculously oversized). The logical thing to do was to shrink the eye texture and fit it in where I could. It's actually not too bad. I just checked and the underwear has a bit of a lip around it. I think Obsidian must have added that, as I know I have had gap issues in K1 with just the vanilla heads. I had to scunch the verts up a bit vertically, as TOR necks are longer than KOTOR's. Then I just snapped to verts where possible, and snapped to edges in between.

Like I said, that would be why KOTOR uses tacky trimesh eyelids instead of animating flaps on the face mesh. If the smoothing across meshes issue can be fully resolved, the easiest solution is probably just to slice the head in two at the nose before exporting.

Yes. It drops 2 bones - affected verts stretch down to world 0 due to no weights I gather.

I've made an attempt at it. It hasn't been tested beyond character creation and the first conversation with Kreia, so treat it as a beta/WIP: A few notes: While aligned as closely as possible, the neckline won't match perfectly. Expect some visible gaps on body models that don't hide the join, like underwear. The TOR head models use separate textures for the face, eyes, and hair. In order to allow for DS transitions, these had to be merged together (and the UVs adjusted to match). The eyes are the big loser in this. They went from having their own dedicated 256x256 texture to being shrunk down to a ~80x80 corner where they could be squeezed in. An additional consequence of the texture merge is no normal maps, due to the hair requiring alpha masking. Regarding DS transitions, there's just the one, using Jaesa's DS appearance. Pic. TOR heavily relies on tint mapping textures for variation - skin tone, hair colour, eye colour, etc. Unfortunately, while the tint colours are available in the material files, the specifics of their shaders are unknown (to me at least), so the best I can do is experiment with various blend modes to approximate the look. It may require some further experimentation and kludging. It doesn't help that TOR's in-game result is heavily influenced by the room/area lighting. Not even having specularity, much less the advanced (by comparison) graphical features of TOR, expect textures to look pretty flat by comparison to the originals. KOTOR has a maximum bone limit per mesh of 16. This creates a problem for TOR meshes, as adding the eyelids to the face bone array pushes that to 18. I had to drop 2 bones to make it work. I chose the two nose corner bones, as they seemed the least important. I don't know what effect this may have on various facial animations though. It's probably not too big a deal for a player head, but it could be troublesome for NPC heads. Vanilla KOTOR head meshes have the eyelids as separate trimeshes for this reason. The hair meshes in TOR are cloth driven, the same as Twi'lek lekku, capes, etc. Obviously KOTOR doesn't have any provision for that. It does have danglymeshes, but I haven't tried it out with Jaesa's hair yet, so currently it is completely rigid. The skin weights were produced by skin wrapping a KOTOR head, with some manual touch-up afterwards. The result is pretty rough. It could stand being redone by someone that actually knows what they are doing. It shouldn't be too bad for a player head, but there will likely be deformation issues when speaking if used for an NPC.

I need to provide some back-of-the-box quotes as well. "Yeah, it was OK I guess" "I haven't uninstalled it yet, so there's that" "If you are a fan of mods, this is a mod" "The most fun I've ever had extracting a ZIP archive"

You don't need to be a sub just to do the class stories, planet side-quests, and the 1-50 Flashpoints. If you are in a group, even as F2P it should be pretty straightforward with all the balance changes made since launch. Your big limitation would be the number of character slots. As a former sub you'll be classed as preferred, so you get a few more slots than base level F2P. Whether you have any slots free to create new characters will depend on how many you have on that server from launch. Without a sub PVP and Operations are probably out. I'm not actively playing at the moment, but I have a bunch of characters on the Satele Shan server, which is all that remains post-server merge of the old west coast servers (even though now it is physically on the east coast). I have no interest in PVP or Flashpoints/Operations and I have no headset if you are looking for that sort of interaction (plus my connection is too terrible to cope with that stuff), but I don't mind dusting off one of my characters to help someone run through class stories. One of the best things they did for group play is the level scaling that allows a max level character to play with low level characters. I wish they had that at launch. That aside, my 2c regarding faction/class would be Empire and Sith Warrior (Dark Side, naturally). Everyone seems to love Imperial Agent, so you probably can't go wrong there for video content. If you prefer the Republic, Smuggler is great for a laugh if you play a man-whore, so that again might be a good choice if the goal is video content. Edit: I think SH and most of the other denizens hereabouts are on the east cost server, Star Forge? Edit 2: Oh yeah, I just remembered one thing that really does suck about the F2P limitations - the locked quickbars. Did you ever attach a security key to your account? If you had one back at launch you'll have a bunch of Cartel Coins (currency for in the in-game cash shop). You get 100 coins each month for that. You could use that to buy some unlocks, like the quickbars, to make your experience less terrible.

Perhaps I should start a rating system.

Ah, I had forgotten that the source textures were available. I'd never downloaded them, so was only going from what I had on my HDD. Looking at the heavy blaster source, it looks like it would be easy enough to get a psuedo-height map out of that just by turning off the colour layers, although it might need some manual adjustment/cleanup in a few spots. Here's a quick and dirty example: Although if you were going to go that route you'd want to turn off all the highlights on the diffuse and rely on the normal map for that detail. But to be honest I'd just stick with SS's vanilla textures. They are more than good enough on their own.

The other thing is that SS's textures - presumably on purpose - have a lot of grain. Trying to generate normal maps from colour images usually ends poorly at the best of times, but the grain in this case would make for a very noisy normal map. A noisy normal map is a bad normal map. Additionally, the source texture is pretty low res. It works fine in the game given the size of the blasters, but again this makes for a poor normal map when taking into account the effect of compression artefacts. The thing to keep in mind is that normal maps are not magic. Adding one doesn't inherently make a model look better. On the contrary, a poor normal map will make it look worse.

I'm guessing that's a bad normal map, or bad UVs on the model. The "weathering" you are seeing is presumably compression artefacts. Edit: Ah, I see what it is. You used the w_hvyblstr_003 texture to generate the normal map. It has those details on the "magazine" (or whatever that bit is). I think you'd be better off just not using the normal map. SS went to the trouble of faking height detail in the texture. A half-assed normal map is going to make it look worse, not better.

Yeah it's a legacy of the vanilla models. SS left the bullethook in the same position: To be honest probably the only time anyone would notice is in a screenshot like that. If you wanted to adjust it, decompile the model and open the ASCII in a text editor. Look for the bullethook. It should be something like this: node dummy bullethook parent w_hvyblstr_003 position 0.0001741 0.354063 0.108606 orientation 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 endnode Change it to: node dummy bullethook parent w_hvyblstr_003 position 0.0 0.375 0.108606 orientation 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 endnode And recompile. See if that makes a difference. If it still looks off, you could bump the Y position to 0.395 and see how that looks. N.B. if you have made your own custom model then your parent name will be different. You don't need to touch that, just the position values.

The bullethook and muzzlehook probably didn't have their positions altered to match the new model geometry. What's the original model name?

The H body already has a yellow texture variant. Probably a good starting point.

There's probably more mileage in pulling the helmet off the spaceman and sticking it on one of the regular armoured bodies, then using that as a basis for a retexture.

The quote is specifically regarding the model. It's not applicable to the texture, so nothing to worry about there.

Looks like Brejik with a beard and a tattoo (and some weird shading over the nose/brows). And maybe with Gadon's eye texture? The link posted by milestails is still live - https://deadlystream.com/topic/4861-anyone-have-spacealexs-k1-enhancement-pack/

Tsk, tsk. Kids these days. No patience.

There's a mod that switches the PC version back to a human, but I'm not sure there is one that gives him a unique appearance.

With the full set of combat animations they can use any weapons. Sabers was the original request, and yes, I doubt the Sith would care how many limbs they accidentally lop off.

You can just run the installer a second time with the correct changes.ini and it will fix the problem. It will overwrite the models/textures and edit the Couscant row of planetary.2da. That's probably easier than trying to edit it manually if you don't know what you are doing.

Not sure. Photoshop 6.0 is a good possibility, it came out in 2000. Or they may have still been on 5.0/5.5. Alternatively, they might have been using PaintShop Pro 6 or 7 which was pretty big at the time. I'm not sure there's any hard evidence either way. We do know for sure they used 3DS Max for the modelling though (probably v4, the same one GMax is based off).

That's because most textures mods are pretty crap. If you see "HD" anywhere in the title, nine times out ten you can just roll your eyes and close the tab. The aforementioned redrob is one of the few modders that I could unequivocally recommend when it comes to textures.

Ah, sorry, yeah. The Twi'lek body textures are the same in TSL as K1, all 256x256. It's the head textures that have some larger 512x512 versions in TSL. Although there are the twin assassins. They have larger body textures, and it's just the standard Twi'lek female body model. You could repurpose those. There are already a few mods based on those. A notable one being @redrob41's Luxa mod, which makes a nice hot pants version. That's cool. I don't remember seeing that thug one. The chest kind of reminds me of an armour in TOR that I quite like.

Head textures? Those are no better in TSL, so you'd have to see if there are any mods that have made a higher res retexture. None spring to mind.