ToEE Portraits Made Easy: Help & Discussion

Grab the ToEE Portraits Made Easy portrait pack from here:


--> DOWNLOAD <-- | For Circle of Eight Modpack 8.0.0 Standard Edition

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README: CUSTOM PORTRAITS FOR TOEE & THE CIRCLE OF EIGHT MODPACK



DISCLAIMER

Despite our best intentions, making custom portraits for ToEE is really not easy, and never will be. It can be fairly simple to middlingly difficult to very difficult, depending on your technical proficiency and the tools you have available to you. Replacing portraits is not really a big deal, but if you don't have Photoshop, you probably won't have much luck creating your own. What this guide will do for you is explain all the steps in as much detail as possible, and provide you with base custom image files that are already set to the necessary specs in order to work in ToEE. You can use these to build your own custom portraits if necessary.



INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

Extract the contents of the WinRAR archive to your ToEE root directory, which is normally C:\Program Files\Atari\Temple of Elemental Evil. Overwrite any existing files.

After installation, navigate to the Temple of Elemental Evil/data/art/interface/portraits directory using Windows Explorer. Here you will find a great many .tga files that constitute the game's portraits for PCs, NPCs, and monsters. Among all these .tga files, you will find 175 files that start with the words CUSTOM_PORTRAIT. If you were to look at these files in-game, you would find that they are currently all black. These are the .tga files that will become your custom portraits.



TOEE PORTRAIT STRUCTURE

Let's have a look at how ToEE handles portraits. For each PC, monster, or NPC, you will see that there are actually 5 images. These consist of a 'big' image that is displayed in the PC character window along with stats, feats, skills, inventory, etc. Next there are four smaller images that are displayed in-game along the bottom of the screen to represent your party members during non-combat play, and along the top of the screen to represent the members of your party during combat. There are two 'small' images that are used most of the time, and two 'mini' images that are used when space gets tight because there are a lot of participants in combat. Both the 'small' and the 'mini' image have a color version and a grey version, the grey being used to show your party members as being dead or unconscious. Only PCs have a 'big' image.

So, each PC portrait in ToEE actually consists of 5 images. In the case of our custom portraits, they are named like this:

Code:

CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0010_B.tga
CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0011_M.tga
CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0012_S.tga
CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0013_S_GREY.tga
CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0014_M_GREY.tga

B, M, S, S_GREY, and M_GREY stand for (not surprisingly) big, mini, small, small grey, and mini grey.

The numbering can appear a bit confusing at first, but it's easiest just to think of it like you would a four digit number with a decimal point after the third digit, like 123.4. In the example above, the first three digits (001) are the same for all five images. That's because these images represent a single portrait, numbered 001. The last digit indicates which image (big, small, mini, etc.) of the set it is. Big is always 0, mini is always 1, small is always 2, small_grey is always 3, and mini_grey is always 4.

Being as there are 175 image files in this pack that are of the 'CUSTOM' variety, and being as each ToEE portrait consists of 5 image files, we can deduce that this pack will actually contain 35 custom portraits in total. These portraits will be displayed at the bottom of the portrait selection screen in-game, after Half Orcs.



THE IMAGE FILES

ToEE portraits are targa image files, or .tga files. They must conform to a specific structure in order to work in ToEE:

• The BIG images must be 130 pixels wide and 150 pixels high.
• The SMALL images must be 53 pixels wide and 47 pixels high.
• The MINI images must be 42 pixels wide and 37 pixels high.
• Each of the SMALL and MINI images must have a 1 pixel-wide black border around the entire image.
• Each image must be 32 bit resolution.
• Each image must have a white alpha channel behind it. Don't know what that means? Just think of it as a white piece of paper that sits behind the paper you're drawing a picture on.

CREATING YOUR PORTRAITS

If you ran the game after installation of this pack without doing anything else, you'd just see a bunch of black squares where the custom portraits should be. That's because all the included .tga image files are just black at the moment. We need to add the actual images you want to use, and there are two ways to do this.

IF YOU ALREADY HAVE YOUR IMAGES IN THE CORRECT SPECIFICATIONS NEEDED FOR USE IN TOEE:

Let's say you downloaded a portrait pack from Sorcerer's Place that already conatins a bunch of portraits sized and configured for ToEE, but the pack is old so you can't be sure it will work with the current Co8 modpack. All you have to do to get them to work is simply rename the images to what the existing images in this pack are named. That's it. Just make sure each set is named according to the same number, like we discussed above.

For example, let's say you have an Arcanum portrait (with 5 32 bit .tga images already properly sized). They are named ARCANUM_BIG, ARCANUM_MINI, ARCANUM_SMALL, etc. You would need to rename them like so:

Code:

ARCANUM_BIG		change to	CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0010_B
ARCANUM_MINI		change to	CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0011_M
ARCANUM_SMALL		change to	CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0012_S
ARCANUM_SMALL_GREY	change to	CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0013_S_GREY
ARCANUM_MINI_GREY	change to	CUSTOM_PORTRAIT_0014_M_GREY

You can do this for as many or as few of the included black CUSTOM base portrait sets as you like, from 1 to 35. It doesn't matter how many or how few you use. And you can use any image number you like, from 001x to 035x. They don't have to be sequential.

You will find that's its easiest to rename your custom portraits while they are in some other directory besides the ToEE portraits directory, because you can't give two separate files the same name in the same directory. Just remember to put your newly named images in the ToEE portraits directory afterward, and overwrite the base files there.

Tip: I've found that the most reliable way to rename a file to something specific is to copy the text of the original name. (Do this by selecting a base custom ToEE image file, right-click-rename, and with all the text selected, right-click-copy.) Then paste the copied text into the new file name. (Do this by selecting the image file you want to rename, right-click-rename, and with all the text selected, right-click-paste.) If you do it this way you'll save yourself a lot of typing, and you won't have to worry that you made any typos.​

IF YOU NEED TO CREATE YOUR IMAGES:

Let's say you just have a bunch of pictures laying around that you want to turn into ToEE portraits. Here's what you need to do:

1. Launch your art software of choice. Unfortunately it has to be something more sophisticated than MS Paint. It has to be able to open and save Targa (.tga) images, crop, resize, turn an image black and white, and have mutiple images open at one time. Photoshop or Photoshop Elements is ideal.
2. Open up a set of the ToEE base CUSTOM images you just installed from the ToEE 'portraits' folder. Be sure to open all 5 images from a single set.
3. Open up the image you intend to use as a custom portrait.
4. Crop the image to 130 width by 150 height (in pixels), with the subject's head, shoulders, and upper chest contained in the crop. This will be your big image.
5. Drag and drop the cropped image onto the BIG base custom image.
6. Save. Verify the image is still a Targa (.tga) image. (Photoshop is famous for wanting to turn everything you do into a .psd file.) Be sure 32 bit is selected. Also make sure your software hasn't decided to give the image a new name that has 'copy' in it or something like that (another preferred Photoshop maneuver). You need the name of the image to remain EXACTLY as it was.
7. Next crop the original image to 51 width by 45 height (in pixels), with just the subject's head or face contained in the crop. (You may have to 'undo' your original crop first.) This will be your small image. (Notice that these dimensions are slightly less than those indicated in the 'THE IMAGE FILES' section above? That's because we're going to use the black base files to provide a one pixel wide black border.)
8. Drag and drop this cropped image onto the SMALL base custom image.
9. Center the image you just dropped on the base image, if it isn't already centered.
10. Save. Verify the image is still a Targa (.tga) image. Be sure 32 bit is selected. Also make sure the name of the image remains EXACTLY as it was.
11. Next drag and drop the cropped image onto the SMALL_GREY base custom image.
12. Center the image you just dropped on the base image, if it isn't already centered.
13. Make the image black and white. This will be your small_grey image.
14. Save. Verify the image is still a Targa (.tga) image. Be sure 32 bit is selected. Also make sure the name of the image remains EXACTLY as it was.
15. Next resize the image you just cropped to 40 width by 35 height (in pixels). This will be your mini image. (Remember, the dimensions are different than indicated above for the sake of the black border.)
16. Drag and drop this cropped image onto the MINI base custom image.
17. Center the image you just dropped on the base image, if it isn't already centered.
18. Save. Verify the image is still a Targa (.tga) image. Be sure 32 bit is selected. Also make sure the name of the image remains EXACTLY as it was.
19. Next drag and drop the resized image onto the MINI_GREY base custom image.
20. Center the image you just dropped on the base image, if it isn't already centered.
21. Make the image black and white. This will be your mini_grey image.
22. Save. Verify the image is still a Targa (.tga) image. Be sure 32 bit is selected. Also make sure the name of the image remains EXACTLY as it was.

Repeat the above steps for each portrait you want to convert. You can do this for as many or as few of the included black CUSTOM base portrait sets as you like, from 1 to 35. It doesn't matter how many or how few you use. And you can use any image number you like, from 001x to 035x. They don't have to be sequential.​

That is all. When you are done, all your BIG images should be about 77 KB in data size, all your SMALL images should be about 10 KB in data size, and all your MINI images should be about 7 KB in data size. If they're not, it means that you either have the dimensions or the resolution (bit rate) wrong. Re-do them correctly, because they have to be those respective figures exactly in order to work properly. The base images are already sized properly and are the correct bitrate, so this should not normally be an issue. The base images have also already been created with a white alpha channel underneath, so you won't have to worry about alpha channels.

Enjoy your custom ToEE portraits!

 

The portrait packs are only up to date with 5.8.x at the moment. I'll try to bring them up to speed as soon as I can, but for the moment you're out of luck.

 

Okay, I updated them all for 5.9 ...

 

Note that since there were no portrait updates from 5.9.3 to 6.0.0, the current portrait packs (for BG, IWD, PME, and JA2) will work fine with 6.0.0.