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What Is Needed to Texture in KOTOR?

Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) is a role-playing game set in the distant past of the Star Wars universe. It was released in 2003, and despite earning a legacy-game status because of its age, it still has an active modding community online. Because of its status, however, the developer, Bioware, has been reluctant to put much support behind modders, those who want to customize the content. With the proper software, however, you can make your own custom textures.

KOTOR Tool
- For those who want to texture KOTOR, there is no single piece of software more useful than KOTOR tool. Aside from being a virtual Swiss Army knife of features, the package has one of the easiest mechanisms to extract the textures from the game resource files. For those who edit textures, KOTOR tool allows you to not only create customized images for items such as armor and light sabers, but also allows you to edit their properties with relative ease.
Image Editing Software
- Although many packages (such as KOTOR tool) have minimal graphic-editing capabilities, the true texture-modifying enthusiast will find a true image-editing suite useful to produce the best results. Free graphic-editing software such as Gimp can edit the files with good output, but getting such software to output the finished files to the required format (32bit/channel Targa) can be tricky. Professional commercial software such as Adobe Photoshop is a better option because it allows you more control over your output files and has better alpha channel/transparency support.
Reference Texture Images
- A step that many people overlook is to start with quality reference texture images for their projects. Freehand or solely computer-generated textures often look poor when placed into the game environment. You can improve the visual appeal of your modification by taking images of real-world materials such as shiny metal, mesh, or cloth, and altering them to suit the three-dimensional surface where you will map them. For texture maps of faces, consider the shape of the model to filter images that will not map properly. It would not make sense to collect images of round faces for a model of a slender man.
Alpha Channel Selections
- For the best texture effects, search for a collection of alpha channel maps to apply to your project. If you want to apply an effect such as torn edges or holes to cloth, a proper alpha channel image map can augment your texture in a way that image editing alone cannot. You can also use alpha channels to weather or distress metals and plastics, or wrinkle or blemish skin textures without modifying the original texture image.

Computer Games