Applying SWTOR animations to a skeleton

Where are the game's animations stored?

SWTOR's transition to 64bit last March 2023 involved a radical change in the way the animation information is stored. The files and their positions are the same, but their data lacks bone labelling, which means that our importer needs to be wholly rethought.

So, for the time being, we need to use the old SWTOR 32bit's animation files. You can grab them from here (select all folders, or at least the humanoid one).

Don't replace the asset extraction's resources\anim folder contents with them, as any new asset extraction (for example, after a Game Update with new locations and characters) would overwrite them, and we don't have any tool automating their use at the moment, anyway, so… Place them somewhere outside the resources folder (next to it is OK).

We are still showing in this guide where those files are supposed to be. The subfoders structure is identical.

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The animations are stored at SWTOR Slicers app's Output Folder\resources\anim. Of the various folders there, it's the one named \humanoid where we can find our player characters' animations (and humanoid NPCs'), with subfolders for each body type. The animation files use the .jba extensión.

Of the animations stored there, the ones that don't seem to work at all (do you want to know what Luke et al. would look like if the trash compactor hadn't been stopped? 😅) are the ones prefixed with an "ad_". Everything else works quite OK, although there are a few animations that result in fairly noticeable distortion: elongated necks and limbs.

(If we are using the animations to find interesting poses, as if we were screencapturing a frame in a cinematic, it's easy to eliminate thsee distortions by resetting the bones' translations while keeping the rotations, and maybe readjusting things a little)

How to apply the animations.

So, adding animations to our characters' skeletons is another of those couple-of-clicks-and-done things:

• We select the skeleton of the character we want to animate (or at least make sure it was the very last thing that was selected before deselecting everything). There's no need to switch to Pose Mode: this works in Object Mode, too. And it doesn't matter if we have several characters with skeletons: the animation will go to that selected or last-selected one.

• Then we use the .jba import to import an animation. It'll be assigned to that skeleton.

And that's it. We can move through any of the animation editors' timelines to watch the animation or look for interesting frames' poses.

Typically, the character will have turned 180º and will be looking away from the camera. That will play havok with any armor or hair bits that depend on game physics, so, they'll need some work to prevent that, by either having them rigidly follow the existing body bones or by adding our own or a cloth simulation.

There are animations for things like combat where there are files for each fighter: those animations include all their opposite to an fro movements, so, re-enacting fights is effortless.

Animation files' types per prefix.

Fellow Slicer Farlo tried the different animations per filename prefix, and this is what we have so far:

Prefix	Presumed type
ad_	Additive animation (to be blended with other animations to add a range of movement). Sadly, these almost always import badly, turning the characters into a puddle on the floor.
am_	Ambient.
anim_	Morph Target Library for animations?
as_	Activation Sequence? Mounts, Holocalls, etc.
cb_	Combat
cc_	Character Creator
cd_	Cutscene Dependent? Big moments, choreographed fights, etc.
dg_	Damage
dl_	Dialog-related Animations and Gestures
em_	Emote.
ev_	Evade.
ex_	Executable/Extras?
fp_	Force Power.
humanoid_action	Morph Targets for Actions.
humanoid_loco	Morph Targets for Movements.
humanoid_no_aim_loco	Morph Targets for Movements with no aim/head tracking?
humanoid_overlay	Morph Target Overlays for blending with others.
humanoid_overlay…ad_face	Facial Morph Targets for Character Moods.
mas_	Movement Activation Sequence.
mv_	Movement.
mv_cb	Combat Movement.
po_	Pose.
qa_test	Basic Anims for the QA team to test with.
rd_boss	Raid Boss.
sc_	Space Combat.
si_	Scale Interaction (moving up and down cliff faces etc).

We recommend giving the list of filenames a quick look to get an idea of how BioWare's naming scheme works. Normally, filtering them by descriptive search words such as, say, "crossed", "dance", "mount", "sit", etc., is quite effective for finding the ones we are looking for.