I downloaded TOEE Custom Portraits and tried to follow the instructions. Before I go any further, I will confirm, yes-I am an idiot when it comes to this stuff. Anyway, I tested it and found that the Smileyface was indeed in the portrait selections and I was all exited! However when I added my custom portrait, (my favorite, a Frazetta of Conan), it did not show up. I am guessing this is because I know absolutely nothing about alpha channnels in white with a one pixel black border as per the instructions. My 5 portraits are the right size, and I did view the Smileyface to try to ascertain what he was talking about, but to no avail. Can anyone help?
Well if you are still around I think I can help you. I've just started making my own portraits for ToEE. I found that if there's anything that's easy about it, it's messing things up. Disregard the Alpha Channel stuff. What you need to do is to make sure of these things. Portraits are the correct size. The small and mini portraits should have one pixel frame of 'nothing', easily made by using a 1p eraser pencil and removing the edges of your image. They only have one layer. They are all fullcolor (RGB), not Grayshade, so use three wipes of the Sponge tool to remove all colour. And then it's the icky part were you got to make sure that your portrait referance in the portraits.mes is correct. Exampli gratia. I added a Female gnome portrait that I wanted to be the fourth portrait. I added these lines to the portrait.mes: {0040} {GNF_0040_b_Mage.tga} {0041} {GNF_0041_m_Mage.tga} {0042} {GNF_0042_s_Mage.tga} {0043} {GNF_0043_s_Mage_grey.tga} {0044} {GNF_0044_m_Mage_grey.tga} The silly names are the names of the images I used. As you can see naming the files in handy codes makes it a lot easier to get the right reference to the right image. Hope this helps. In my own humble opinion good portraits is the foundation of the very soul of a CRPG. If you can't have your character look like you want them to, you'll never care for the story.
Wauthan, I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my query. I had pretty much given up hope that anyone would. However, in trying to implement your suggestions I ran into some problems. That one pixel eraser is impossible for me to get right, and I could not find a sponge tool. I'm using Adobe PhotoDeluxe Business Edition 1.0, but I'm not very conversant with it. heh heh When I go into the tools, I have brush, color change, line, eraser, smudge, clone and view selection. Oh, wait a minute now...I think I may have discovered how to do the eraser part. Ouch! I'll bet you didn't realize what a neophyte you had here. I didn't know that you could blow it up to erase. Couldn't figure out how you could see what you were doing with that small picture. But that still leaves the sponge part. Can you help with that, perhaps?
Hehe, keep forgetting that everyone haven't invested in Photoshop 7. Where to find the sponge tool in PhotoDeluxe then... I know this program has it since it's standard in all Adobe graphic utilities. Can you find a tool called "Dodge" or "Burn"? Try rightclicking on that tool and see if you can access "Sponge" (desaturate). And if you can't find it it's no big deal. It's just that the game uses a grey portrait to show that a character is dying or dead. You can use any portrait, like a skull, in order to produce the same effect. For anyone else intersted in making custom portraits I noticed I could get 24 bit targas to work just as well as 32 bit. Not very important but helps people that want to use less colours in their images. Any tip for locating images of faces from female dwarves, gnomes and halforcs always appreciated. So far ToEE have taken the lead over all CRPG competition with a whopping 1 female dwarf and 2 female halforcs.
Not sure about other games but I know of a few IWD2 portrait sites. I don't think the images are in the correct format though. Hope they can be manipulated and used. Crucis's site: http://www.mv.com/ipusers/starfire/index.htm Peterond's site: http://silverbow.dwec.org/iwd2.htm The links to IWD2 portrait sites (3rd post)(might have some dead links): http://forums.interplay.com/viewtopic.php?p=147803&sid=9549af8131404ce71f81803882c7eda2#147803 Hope you can find what you are looking for.
Thanks Zhuge but I'm one of the older foxes when it comes to Infinity Engine portrait making. Those sites where the first place I looked But it was a good idea to post the links. I don't know how many people that are interested in custom portraits for ToEE but Icewind Dale portrait sites are a very good place to find material. I wonder how many portraits that could be added to ToEE? It propably doesn't matter since there's little reason for a joint effort in this. People like so very different styles in their portraits that it would be very hard to make a portrait.mes that suits many. Still... if there was someone around with enough interest to run a ToEE portrait site, and portrait.mes editing walktrough, it would save quite a bit of work. I found that the nearly square portraits of this game is pretty hard to deal with. Almost none of the images I've used for BG and IWD work here. All faces must be facing the viewer and hardly any equipment is showing.
Should've known. You're an old hand after all at BG2 portrait mods. I vaguely recall someone mentioning the portrait screen not scrolling properly after a certain number of portraits were added. Not sure about any limit though. Certainly! I think that's a worthy endeavour. At least posting a portrait.mes editing walkthrough would be a step forward. And later on we might be able to expand to textures and meshes. Not that I know anything about these. But I've seen a few interested forumers around. Kharmakazy, rex_blade come to mind and I passed ToEExtract to Mystic (texture artist, Atari forums) sometime back. Get an interested group and you're set. Hmm... I'm really no good at this graphics stuff. But is there some kind of "cropping" tool we can use to edit things. Pardon my ignorance and do correct me if I'm way off.
I should have used the word "pose" instead of "image". In BG and IWD the largest portrait was much taller than it was wide, favoring full figure poses. In ToEE it's nearly square, favoring only facial portraits. This means that it's hard to create a dramatic image, like IWDs eerie and distant portraits. It's a lot easier to create a good, detailed, face though. A ToEE portrait FAQ eh? Well I guess we could use this thread to start hammering one out. I'm no good at coming up with questions that might face people so I'll just answer the questions that I encountered myself. How many images does it take to create on PC portrait? Five. One big, two small and two mini. They must all be Targas, end with .tga, in order to work. They must be colour (RGB) of atleast 24 bit, preferably 32 bit. What dimensions are the different images that makes the portraits? The largest one (big) is 150 pixels tall and 130 pixels wide. The medium one (small) is 47p tall and 53p wide. The smallest one (mini) is a mere 37p tall and 42p wide. Important! Small and mini needs to be surrounded by a 1p border of "nothing" (which looks like alternating squares of white and grey). Easiest way is to use an eraser tool and remove a 1p frame around the image. But that's just three. What about the other two? For the portrait to be complete you need to add "Dead" images to the portrait. The default for this is grey versions of the small and mini images. But you don't need to be bound by this. Feel free to use other motives, like a skull, if you think it's more to your liking. I made all the images and put them into the "data/art/interface/portraits" folder but I can't select them ingame! Sadly ToEE is not like IWD or BG in the way that the game itself looks for compatible images. You need to "tell" the game that they are available by editing the portraits.mes file. Open this file using notepad. You will see some helpful instructions as well as a lot of rows of enigmatic codes. The rows consist of a number inside brackets, eg {0010}, followed by a code inside brackets, eg{GNM_0010_b_illusionist.tga}. The number tells the game that a portrait is to be used on this spot in the "Portrait" selection screen. The code is the name of the image to use. To add a portrait scroll down until you see a "free spot". In an unedited portrait.mes this first occurs after {0034} {GNF_0034_m_rogue_grey.tga}. This is the portrait of the scantily clad hooded woman with knife. She's apparently a gnome. Make a blank row beneath this line. Then add this {0040}. This tells ToEE you are adding a new portrait. In the "Gnome Section" as it happens to be but it really doesn't matter. Then add brackets {}. Inside these brackets you write the name of your big image that's part of the portrait. Don't forget to add the .tga after it. This tells ToEE what image file to use in this part of the portrait. Press enter. Add {0041}{name of your mini image.tga} Follow with {0042}{name of your small image.tga} Then {0043}{Name of small "Dead" or "grey" image.tga} Finish with {0044}{Name of mini "dead" or "grey" image.tga} Load up the game and if no confusion occured you will see your image right after the one of the hooded woman. I'm sure I followed all the steps but the game freaks out when I enter the portrait selection screen. Images are out of focus or contain cursors. You accidently made a wrong reference for ToEE. This is no big problem but happens easily. You simply mixed up the names for the images you used. The right order is first big, then mini, then small, then small grey and finish with mini grey. b,m,s,sg,mg. Avoid this by naming your images in such a way that no mistakes can be made. This is how I did it. {0040} {GNF_0040_b_Mage.tga} {0041} {GNF_0041_m_Mage.tga} {0042} {GNF_0042_s_Mage.tga} {0043} {GNF_0043_s_Mage_grey.tga} {0044} {GNF_0044_m_Mage_grey.tga} A bit over the top perhaps but you get the idea. When using custom portrait the game stalls when my character dies. You took the easy way and simply "greyscaled" your images. ToEE only accepts colour (RGB) images. Use the sponge tool to desaturate all colour from the image, or simply paint it grey. Remember that it doesn't have to be black and white. But it will look odd compared to the other portraits of dead characters if it's not. Great everything works perfectly. Now I want to add more portraits. Just follow the steps, adding ten to each number inside the brackets for each new portrait. {0050}, {0060}, {0070} etc. Once, or rather if, you hit {0500} you need to stop. This marks the end of the "Free spots". Next one occurs after {0594} {HUM_0594_m_antipaladin_grey.tga}. The information you need to find other free starting points is all there in the introduktion part of the portrait.mes file. I added *a lot* of portraits and now the game freaks out again at the portrait selection screen. There's an upper limit on how many portraits that can be added. Think things trough a bit. Do you really need all those images of nubile drow women in bikinis? That's all the questions I can come up with. Please add more if you can think of any. Also feel free to edit the text to make it less confusing.
Hmm... Just ran right into a brick wall. I made my first major attempt to install portraits. So far I've just gathered images and experimented with just a few. Noticed that ToEE crashes, badly, if I add more than 10 portraits. And if I add more than 5 then it starts "pushing out" portraits starting with the female halforc monk. Not good news at all. I'm confused though since there has been talk about people adding more than 20+ portraits without any problem. Perhaps they have replaced the already existing art? Also noticed that some portraits become blurred in ToEE while they are sharp outside the game. This is all very strange.
Well the good news is that my "portrait pack" is nearly completed, with the bad news being that I have no idea how to fix the blurring and the limit of five extra portraits. Though I'm happy to see that Steve dropped by the official forums I must confess that my hopes are not high. He's one man, working on his holiday, and will not have the time or resources to fix any bug that requires much time and testing. Good thing you guys are around to make his work lighter though. Wonder what outrageous request people have launched at him. Somehow I guess that portraits are not high on the list of priorities.
IWD2 portraits Sorry for the double post, but this may be a better place for this... Here are 25 IWD2 portraits I've done. I'm going to do all of them, this is less than half. I slowly do a couple more every night. http://server1.ripplehost.com/~rh291/PORTRAITS.rar the portraits.mes totally takes out all the TOEE pc portraits. I didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying to fit all the portraits in with the old TOEE ones...I like the IWD2 ones better anyway You don't have to use that portraits.mes though, you can just make your own with the portraits you want. I will be updating this with more and more IWD2 portraits as I do them.
