• KotOR Tool
• GIMP

This tutorial will briefly explain the method of adding a new wearable piece of armor to the game without overwriting another or using a stock texture. If you find any discrepancies please report them to the KotORFiles staff.

1. Everybody wants a robe to call their own. This tutorial will briefly explain how to add your own custom armor skin into the game: specifically we will deal with a custom Jedi robe.


2. The first thing you need to do is find the UTI - item file - of the armor you want to reskin. For this example we will use g_a_jedirobe001.uti, a basic Jedi robe, as a template. Upon opening the UTI you will see two important fields: Body Variation, and Texture Variation. These are both very easy to understand if you can count to 10 and know your alphabet. You can see that our Jedi robe says it is Body Variation 9. Count to the 9th letter in the alphabet: I. Now go into the ERFs section of KotOR Tool, into the texture sections, and into P. The texture we are looking for is PMBI01.tpc. Now I must explain the naming conventions of these textures. In this example, which will hold true for all armor textures, the individual characters stand for the following: P = player, M = male, B = body, I = body variation, 01 = texture variation. So for instance if you were looking for the female version of this texture, it would be PFBI01.tpc. Now that we've found our texture, let's extract it to TGA so we can alter it.


Note: For the wary, you may find, when altering your texture, that it is difficult to tell exactly how your texture will look on the model when completed. To avoid making changes and discovering they are wrong/misplaced, import the body model into gmax and apply the texture! Naming conventions for the body models will match the textures, but will have an L, M, or S on the end in some cases (large, medium, small). Our particular variation has an S on the end, but you can ignore this, as it's the only variation of this model.


3. Next we want to alter the texture. That was the whole point, right? Open up this TGA in gimp, photoshop, or any other suitable graphics program that can handle targa (TGA) files. What you change is up to you. Remember, the more unique your skin the more people will like it. Something boring like a simple color change may not be welcomed with rave reviews, but sometimes it can work very well. For this tutorial we'll simply assume that we changed the color to a very bright and obnoxious pink color. Once we're done altering our image and we're happy with it, simply save the targa. Put this in your override folder.


4. Now we need to make this armor unique. We don't want our pink robe to overwrite the default Jedi robe! Oh the horror... The first thing we need to do is go back to KotOR Tool and open up our template UTI again: g_a_jedirobe001.uti. If you've been paying attention, you should have a decent idea of what we need to do to make it unique. If you don't, don't worry about it. We know that our body variation is 9 (or I) so we don't want to change that or you'll get a completely new body shape. What we do want to change is our texture variation. We need to make this something unique - I would recommend using a high number, but not so high. The idea is to pick a number no one else would have picked! I always pick 78, so let's assume we picked that. Change the texture variation to 78. Save this UTI to your override folder with a unique name, and unique (and matching) tag and ResRef, after you make any changes you want (properties, name, description, etc). I will name my g_a_jedirobe78.uti.


5. Someone must be asking "but our texture is variation 01!" Now we need to change that, as well. Your texture, which should already be in your override folder, simply needs one quick change: rename it and change the number from 01 to 78. Simple! Test it in-game to see if it worked! Keep in mind you can do this with any armor, not just Jedi robes!


6. The last thing to know before finishing up your robe is that if you are not making it overwrite, it will also not have an icon! We don't want an ugly white block in our game, so let's go ahead and give it an icon. The icon can be anything you want - a picture of the robe, or a picture of your cat - simply make sure it is sized to 64x64, and save it as a 32 bit TGA. Save it as ig_a_jedirobe78.tga and you're set!



Rate this Page!10 - This rocks!9 - It's tight!8 - Pretty good!7 - Not Bad!6 - I've seen better!5 - Average4 - I'm getting seasick!3 - Eat my shorts!2 - One word: ...1 - Please kill me!
Average User Rating: 6.3
Number of Votes: 43