Free ranks in skills from race normally can't raise skills above two at character creation, but heroic level play raises this to three. Can the free ranks from having the skill as a career skill, specialization skill and being a race that gives a bonus rank (Like a Twi'lek Politico taking 3x Charm) raise a skill up to rank three during heroic level character creation?

3 minutes ago, NanashiAnon said:

Free ranks in skills from race normally can't raise skills above two at character creation, but heroic level play raises this to three. Can the free ranks from having the skill as a career skill, specialization skill and being a race that gives a bonus rank (Like a Twi'lek Politico taking 3x Charm) raise a skill up to rank three during heroic level character creation?

No. If you want your heroic charactetr to hae that third rank, you must spend some of that "bonus" XP from Heroic Level for it.

4 minutes ago, NanashiAnon said:

Free ranks in skills from race normally can't raise skills above two at character creation, but heroic level play raises this to three. Can the free ranks from having the skill as a career skill, specialization skill and being a race that gives a bonus rank (Like a Twi'lek Politico taking 3x Charm) raise a skill up to rank three during heroic level character creation?

No. First you build the character rules-legal without the bonus XP, then you add the extra XP.

That's what I expected.

3 hours ago, NanashiAnon said:

Free ranks in skills from race normally can't raise skills above two at character creation, but heroic level play raises this to three. Can the free ranks from having the skill as a career skill, specialization skill and being a race that gives a bonus rank (Like a Twi'lek Politico taking 3x Charm) raise a skill up to rank three during heroic level character creation?

Be cool if you could, but under RAW for the Heroic/Knight Level you can't, as that XP gets added after you've completed the rest of the character creation steps, which includes selecting Motivation and group resource, both steps that occur after you've determined your initial skill ranks. What being a Heroic/Knight Level PC grants you is the option to get to three ranks in a skill with XP.

Granted, if a species (such as Corellian Humans from Suns of Fortune) says that "hey, you can push this specific skill up to three ranks at character creation," then you can go ahead and start that character with three ranks in that specific skill (for Corellian Humans, it'd be either of the Piloting skills) simply by stacking the starting species skill rank, starting career skill rank, and starting specialization skill rank. But that's separate from the Heroic/Knight Level rules.

Of course, if the GM is cool with it, then you can certainly implement the ability to stack starting skill ranks to get to 3 ranks, such as the example you provided. It's not a gamebreaker for Heroic/Knight Level characters because most anyone can get to 3 ranks in their core skills fairly easily, though doing so allows those characters to save some XP that would have been spent on that third skill rank to buy other stuff, but again not something that's going to break the game.