WIP: Cloaked Robes of the Old Republic TSL

[sEcOnDbOuToFiNsAnItY 60]

After a whole bunch of tinkering with my own build in private, I'm finally foraying into something public. Some of you might be familiar with, or dimly remember, a great mod from the old filefront days - Robes of the Old Republic: Back Into TSL, which returns the robes in TSL to a KOTOR 1 style. I've always been a big fan of this one since the K2 robes were always so 4k years in the future for my tastes, but the downside to this mod is that the lovely cloaks disappear. Thankfully, @VarsityPuppet and @90SK had thought of this and made a newer mod that added a cloak to the K1 robe model for K2, with their own textures and recolours for the various outfits. But I always had a liking for the old ROTOR textures, for the most part, so what I used to do on my end was splice textures together to get what I want. So now I figured I may as well make a new mod using elements of both, with my own twists here and there. VP and 90SK were kind enough to give permission to use their assets, and Gavroche very helpfully gives permissiom in ROTOR's readme to use assets. I'm still playing around with various elements, but I figured feedback would be well worth getting before I go any further.

I'm going to preface this by saying that I am not a very good digital artist, and the vast majority of my skills are limited to chop-and-change recolours on that end of things, so don't expect anything godlike if you don't already like the K1 robe textures. Most of these were also edited years ago now since they're the product of my tinkering over the years, and it's only recenlty I've gotten around to updating and reinstalling KOTOR 2 again. But, I have to start somewhere.

I'm not 100% sold on the master and padawan having different textures, at least for the robe under the cloak, but atm the Jedi ones are all either game textures or courtesy of one or both prior mods.

 

The dark robes are something of an options list, but I'm strongly leaning towards using the K1 dark robes texture instead. I've currently got those on a different robe later though, so some poking around might be needed.

 

This is where things got more creative on my end - I wanted the cloaks to match the rotor textures, so I did a lot of trial and improvement on the recolouring. I've also got the K1 orange robes here on the sage slot, but I might move them too. I matched the cloak to the trousers of those robes, but the more I look at it the more I think maybe I should adjust it to be closer to the main robe.

 

The Norris robe is currently home to the old K1 dark jedi robe texture, but I suspect I'll move it over to the dark jedi main in the future. I'm not super satisfied witht hecloak - there's a sort of turquoise tint to the wear lines of the K1 robe that I want to try and recreate in the cloak so it matches, but it's been proving tricky so far. The Ossus Keeper uses the K1 blue robes, and I do like the cloak recolour job I've done, but I am wondering if I should make the cloak blue instead - there's a lot of grey in the robe options already. The Natth Cowling loak I'm irrationally proud of, since I thought matching the pink trousers from ROTOR's tecture would be very striking, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to get it looking right.

 

With the named character robes, I've been experimenting with matching the palette more closely to what the characters wore back in TOTJ, so Arcas and Nima swap base robes, and I did a lot of vsual reference looking to tint the cloaks. Thon obviously doesn't wear much of anything, so I just tried adjusting the colour of his cloak to be as close to his vanilla master-style cloak's colour as possible. The lack of a master-style cloak model does start to hurt how good these can look though, IMO.

 

It was a bit of a surprise that Crado and Sylvar's robes from ROTOR matched their under robes from TOTJ pretty well, so I left them as-is, but I did make their cloaks a matching purple in from their comic cloaks. Aleema needed the most change, and she might yet see more change. In theory I could've given her several different colour combos thanks to her serial wardrobe changes, but I think I've found a nice compromise. And lastly, for Arren Kae's robe, I've got the VP/90SK textures instead of ROTOR for now, but I do plan to make some tweaks, though not major ones - probably try and get the cape more white, eliminate the grey trim, etc.

I have no model editing experience, so I did put out a request for a K1 robe combined with the master-style K2 cloak, but sadly nobody's picked up, so I'll have to shelve that hope for the time being. If anyone's up to help, I'd be very thankful.

I'm entertaining other ideas for the mod, like an uncloaked version or maybe clothes for each class using the NPC robes, K1 ending robes, and uncloaked K1 robes, but I'm not wholly committed to that as of yet.

So that's where things are as of now - watch this space, hopefully.