Using TORCommunity NPCs Database

Our Player Characters aside, TORCommunity.com can provide us with Non Playable Characters (NPC) data that can be used in this auto-assembling workflow, too. Let's see how.

TORCommunity.com's NPC database.

In the website's top menu bar we have the Database dropdown menu, and among its options there is a NPCs one.

So, we click on it to produce a NPCs search form. To keep things simple, we fully or partially type the name of the NPC (a character, a creature, etc.) and click submit. Let's try that with Lana Beniko.

Sorting through the results.

Upon submitting, the form will produce a list of entries for the character. There are so many because they represent all the different conditions in which the game's database presents her in terms of dialogue, specs, etc. All that interests us is her looks, though, which leads us to a fairly important action to do: sort the entries by Min Level, that is, by the minimum player level in which each configuration of the character appears to us during playing.

Why? Because there are several NPCs in the game whose appearance varies depending on when we meet them in the story. For example, Darth Malgus has different armor before and after falling from grace, and Satele Shan shows her age after KotFE/KotET. Sorting by level is a kind of chronological ordering, after which the other columns (Category and Subcategory) help narrow down things.

Still, a way not to have to do much guessing is just MMB-clicking on a few entries around the levels and categories that look interesting to open them in multiple web browser tabs and go through them until we find what we want.

Viewing the NPC and downloading their data.

Let's see one of the results: depending on the type of entry, there will be several panels and tabs, but the one we are interested in is the 3D Viewer common to them all.

We click on its central button and the page will load a 3D model of the character that we can gyrate and zoom to study. The important bit is the bottom diskette icon in the top right column.

This button produces a .zip file export. This .zip file contains exactly the same kind of files and folders structure that the Character Designer does, and, once decompressed anywhere we want in our SSD or hard disk, it can be fed to our Character Assembler tools.

When in doubt, rely on the looks, not on the sliders.

Just as in the case of the PC Character Designer, what we get from a export is what the 3D Viewer shows us. We've seen entries in which the database shows some generic NPC instead of the one we were looking for (possibly because the latter is mentioned somewhere in the data without being the main element). Rely on your eyes.

Next: Using our Blender add-ons to auto-assemble the model.