HELP! Cannot find saber blade tut!

[plokoon87]

Hey everybody, I cannot find the tutorial for modding the saber blades. If there is no such thread can anyone tell me exactly what I need to do to edit the saber planes in gmax?

[DarthParametric]

You can't edit the planes because only a maximum of 2 of the 4 planes (for single hilts) are ever converted into poly objects when MDLOps makes the ASCII model. The other planes are turned into dummy/helper objects. Additionally, in the case of the non-K1 original Xbox single hilts (i.e. MOTF, HOTG and all the hilts added to TSL), none of the blade planes are converted into poly objects.

What this means is that there is no option to replace the missing planes when compiling your binary mesh. Even if you make new poly blade planes and export them in your ASCII model, MDLOps won't give you the option to replace all 4 when compiling the binary model. It will only see a maximum of 2 (or none in the cases mentioned above).

I haven't played with double hilts, but I imagine the case is the same there, except it's probably a case of there being 4 out of 8 planes present as poly objects.

[plokoon87]

Ok, well if you have seen T7's WOTOR, did you notice how skinny Jolee's lightsaber blade was? I want to edit all the blades so that they are a middle-ground thickness between that and the vanilla blade thickness. Thats all.

[DarthParametric]

That's texture edit, not a model edit. Observe:



He also made the tex 256x256 instead of the default 128x128, so it's much more well-defined (as you can see from the blurry mess that is the default tex).

[plokoon87]

So how do I go about changing that?

[DarthParametric]

Extract the original blade textures from the game files to use as a guide, then create your new texture over the top of it. It's nothing particularly fancy - just a gradient with a white/lighter center.

[plokoon87]

Lol, i'm sorry, but I'm a total noob - how do you do that?

[DarthParametric]

Download KOTOR Tool. This tutorial will show you where to find the textures. Extract the blade textures for the colour of blade you want to edit. They have the following filenames:

K1 -
Blue - w_lsabreblue01
Orange/Heart of the Guardian - w_lsabregold01
Green - w_lsabregren01
Purple - w_lsabrepurp01
Red - w_lsabrered01
Turquoise/Mantle of the Force - w_lsabreturq01
Yellow - w_lsabreyelo01

TSL -
All of K1's plus
Viridian - w_lsabreDgrn01
Silver - w_lsabreSilv01

Open the extracted TGAs in Photoshop (or free alternative of your choice) and edit as desired. I would suggest following t7's lead and resizing the TGAs to 256x256.