Overwriting a Blaster Pistol (KotOR)

Difficulty: moderate

Tools you’ll need:

♦ gmax

♦ mdlops

♦ KotOR Tool

♦ nwmax

The first thing you’ll need is gmax. You can download that for free above. This tutorial uses 3DS Max, but the interface should be just about the same.

First, you want to open gmax. Now if you don’t know how to make a model, you’ll want to check out some of gmax’s tutorials. I won’t go into detailed instruction on how to make the actual model. This tutorial is just to run you through how to get your model in the game.

So you’ve made your model, UVW-mapped it, and skinned it. That’s all the hard part, trust me. Getting it into the game in a snap. I’m going to make this easy by breaking it down into steps, so follow along.

1. Export your weapon to a .3DS file.

2. Open up KotOR tool. Go into BIFs, then Aurora Model. Since I’m making a blaster pistol, I’m going to open up that category and scroll down until I find “w_blstrpstl_001.mdl” and I’m going to export it to the desktop. Next I’m going to go back up into models and open up “mdx” and find the mdx file of the same name and export that to desktop.

   

3. Open up MDLOps and select “w_blstrpstl_001.mdl” from your desktop. Make sure the MDL and the MDX are both on your desktop, then click “Read and write model”. This will create a file called “w_blstrpstl_001-ascii.mdl”. This is the file you’ll be importing to gmax. Close MDLOps and open up GMax.

   

4. In GMax, you should see a panel that looks something like this (don’t close this panel!):

   

   Open up the “General Utils” panel and choose “Set Environ”. Then open up “MDL Loading” and, making sure you’ve set the radio button to “Import Geom Only”, find “w_blstrpstl_001-ascii.mdl” and click import.

5. You’ll see the default KotOR blaster in the viewports. There are a few things you don’t want to mess with. Don’t move w_BlstrPstl_001 and don’t move ignore_NGon01. This could cause you some problems if you do, so if you need to hide them until you’re ready to export. What I suggest is selecting all of the parts of the blaster and grouping them, for easy access later. Once you’ve done that, go to file / import and import your model. Depending on how you made it, it may be much too large.

6. Group all of the parts of your model together (once again for easy access) and use the scale and move tools to get it approximately the right size. Bear in mind you may have to re-apply your texture, so do that now if you need to. You’ll notice in my screenshot that my pistol is facing the wrong way, and is much too big. I’ll have to scale it down and rotate it so that it’s in the same position as our base blaster.

   

7. As you can see, I’ve scaled the model down and positioned it just about in the right place. You’ll notice the two green boxes at the end of the muzzle. Those need to be moved to the end of your model (where the blaster shots will come out). Make sure you select only the boxes, then using your four views position them in the correct place.

   

8. Delete your base blaster. If you grouped them like I suggested, you’ll just have to select one object and hit your delete key.

9. Now comes for the technical stuff. In order for this to work correctly, we need to link the model together. We must use the “Select and Link” tool, which I’ve circled in red. Using this, link the bullethook and the muzzlehook (those two boxes) to your gun barrel/muzzle. Then you need to link [i]every part[/i] of your model to one base part. I usually just link everything to the handle. Once you’ve done that, link your handle (or whatever you used as your base part) to w_BlstrPstl_001.

   

10. Now for the fun part. Compiling! First, select all of your model (just use select all), go back into your NWmax panel, into “Mesh Tools”, and click “ResetXForm”. Now select that bottom box, w_BlstrPstl_001, go into the modify panel, and go to export. The official tutorial that comes with MDLOps suggests you make a folder on your desktop called “output” to export your models to, and this is probably a good idea. Export your model to this folder, so you don’t replace the one on your desk top (in case you need it again).

    

11. Open MDLOps back up, if you closed it, and find your model in the output folder. Click “Read and write file”. You should now have two new files in your output folder with “bin” on the end. These are the two files you need.

12. You now have what you need to overwrite the blaster pistol model. To do this, open up your override folder and dump them in. Now rename them “w_blstrpstl_001.mdl” and “w_blstrpstl_001.mdx”. Test them out in-game and you’re done!

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