Our SWTOR Shaders and Materials for Blender

To recreate SWTOR's materials, we have at this moment three sets of Blender Shaders. They are:

• The older, now "Legacy" SWTOR Shaders:

  Those are the first ones DarthAtroxa crafted and released as an Add-on. Their characteristics are:

  • Not a full replica of SWTOR's shader code. They are close to the game's looks, but falter a little.
  • They are Diffuse/Glossy or Principled BSDF Shaders-based.
  • They allow for following Blender's standard Texture Baking methods (they require using those Shaders).
  • They are conventional Nodegroups, with texturemaps connecting to them, and with immediately accessible innards. That makes them fairly easily modifiable, either by altering their inputs (say, interposing other nodes between the texturemap ones and the Shader's inputs) or by altering the Shader Nodegroups themselves.
  • Applying them manually is a little prone to error: they are created by the relevant Add-on as Materials templates of sorts, which we have to duplicate and rename to apply them to the game's objects. It is easy to forget to do the duplicating and accidentally modify and apply the template or some other object's material, instead. The template Materials with these Shaders are created and added to a project on the fly upon importing any SWTOR object into Blender.

• The current, modern SWTOR Shaders:

  Here, DarthAtroxa followed SWTOR's original shader code more closely, and also added some aesthetic judgements in order to match the game's look.

  • They are a far more faithful replica of SWTOR's shader code, and use assets and settings (such as DirectionMaps) that the Legacy Shaders don't.
  • They reproduce the Glossiness from first principles instead of taking advantage of Glossy or Principled shaders, "pasting" it on top of the Diffuse.
  • That makes Baking textures cumbersome, as explained in our Baking Guide: we have to reduce Glossiness to zero to obtain a good bake of the Diffuse.
  • The Shaders' Nodegroups present a more compact and comprehensible user interface, driven by the Add-on, which is easier on the novice.

• A "dumb", customizable version of the modern SWTOR Shaders