SWTOR Shaders for Blender

The latest version of the .gr2 importer add-on for Blender, Darth Atroxa's labor of love, brings a new set of SWTOR-compatible shaders and a different way to build materials for SWTOR objects. They are easier and simpler to handle, although there is a certain lack of tinkerability as a trade-off.

As usual, importing a character exported by TORCommunity's Character Designer or its database's 3D viewer will result in a fully assembled and textured object. Even if we limit ourselves to that, understanding how the new SWTOR shaders work will let us do modifications such as changing the colors and other properties of skin, hair, armor, etc. within and beyond what SWTOR does in a fairly simple and intuitive manner. Also, for the time being, there are a few types of objects that can only be imported, assembled and textured manually, and those are far easier to do with these new shaders.

Six Shaders.

Just as in previous versions of our SWTOR shaders, we have six types. Following the game's internal naming conventions, they are:

Name	Application	Description
Uber	Non-recolorable single objects	Tipically used in single mesh objects such as weapons, vehicles, furniture, buildings, landscape features, etc.
Creature	Non-recolorable single object characters	Typically used in single mesh animated objects such as Non-Player Character humanoids, beasts, robots, etc.
Garment	Recolorable armor and dresses' parts	Typically used in armor gear and dresses to produce multiple variants out of the same objects through different textures and/or colors. It allows for an unchangeable base texture, plus up to two recolorable (dyeable) regions.
SkinB	Recolorable skin	Used for multiple body part objects-based Player and Non-Player Characters' skin materials.
HairC	Recolorable hair	Used for hair, facial hair objects, and generally all other objects applied to a character's head, such as jewelry, cyborg implants, Togruta montrals… (not Twi'lek lekku nor Nautolan tentacles, though: those are part of the head object).
Eye	Recolorable eyes	That. Eyes.

(SWTOR has many other shaders, but with these six as a foundation plus Blender's own features most things are possible, even beyond what the game engine does)

Smarts.

If you have used Blender in general or the previous version of the .gr2 add-on in particular, you'll notice immediately that the new SWTOR shaders are far more sophisticated than what we can build manually (node groups) or even than Blender's native shader nodes. That's because these are really shader node-like control panels produced by the add-on, which is handling the actual shaders under the hood.

The advantages are several, specially for novices:

• No dealing with Material templates any more: they were too prone to accidental overwriting (our very own brand of "wrong layer!" horror).
• No dangling bits: loading or changing texture files is done directly inside the shader's panel (or in the Properties Editor's Material Properties tab). We have a SWTOR shader, the Material Output node, and that's it!
• No worrying about setting the texture images to the correct colorspace (Raw) or the handling of alpha channels (Channel Packed) every time you load or change a texture file. It's all transparently handled by the add-on.
• Details such as the materials' opacity mode are in the shaders, no need to dive into the Material Properties tab and look for those.
• The recoloring (dyeing) controls have common names ("hue", "saturation", etc.) and correct value ranges, making them more comprehensible and comfortable to manipulate using click-drag gestures.

Add to all that the improvement in the results. Darth Atroxa has improved upon the implementation of the game' original shaders, both adding features that were missing (scars with colored tissue, hair and fur's directional reflections) and just making them look closer to what we see in SWTOR and prettier overall.

That said, there are a few trade-offs:

• They are dependent on having the add-on enabled, to an extent. If it is disabled, the shaders' controls will disappear, although the underlying shaders will keep on existing and working, and renders will still be successful.
• Doing custom modifications is more cumbersome. Things as immediate as interposing color correction nodes between the texture file nodes and the shader are impossible. The only way to do those and beyond is to locate the Material's underlying shader and make it "fixed" so that we can tinker with it, even without the add-on being enabled. We'll show how to: it's not really difficult, just a problem of them not having names that let us quickly know which one we need, plus dealing with the complexity of the full-on node trees (which for these purposes is more apparent than real).
• There might be trouble mixing objects textured with the old add-on and the new one. We'll show some best practices about that (which, actually, are recommended no matter which add-on you use).

How to create a SWTOR material.

When we import a SWTOR object through the Import > SW:TOR (.gr2) option, it comes with one or several named materials that feature Blender's default arrangement: a Principled BSDF Shader (the Swiss Army knife of shaders) linked to a Material Output node. So, to make SWTOR materials out of that we have to do the following:

1. Select the object and go to the Node Editor.
2. If the object has several materials (we can check that through the Slot menu or the Outliner), we select the one we want to edit.
3. Once in there, we delete the default Principled BSDF Shader, add the SWTOR Shader you need (shift-a, SWTOR submenu), and link its output to the Material Output node's Surface input.
4. With that in place, we add the texture files and adjust the available parameters. Done!

Understanding the Shaders' controls.