New Portrait Questions

There is a drop-dead beautiful, longhaired blonde with a longspear holding a skull in the Elmore pics. All I could think of was Meleny and the Orb. Wow. Nice pic.

 

I don't have room for all the new submissions. Any objections to removing the Baldur's Gate portraits? Or perhaps most of the Royo portraits?

 

Definitely Royo, or some of the old versions
of characters from BG1 leaving BG2 versions
of them.

Of course I'm being non-objective.

 

yeah all the BG1 can go and most of the Royo, i dont remember all the the ones in the pack. wasnt there some from IWD in there too? if so they could go

 

Uhm, LG, the IWD stuff is half the pack. As far as I can tell, all the BG portraits are from BG2.

 

Alot of the IWD stuff looks like ass to be honest. I'm not sure if it's the artwork or the color-balancing or what, but the vast majority of the characters in the pictures look pretty haggard and/or smudgy.

Having looked through the pictures in the existing pack for closely, there was a suprising number of non-"nerd-porn" pics that were labeled as being Royo. There's quite a few pictures of fully-clothed men and women with normal expressions on their faces admidst the chainmail bikinis.

My preference would be to ditch the crappy-looking IWD pics (but keep the good ones), as well as any BG pics of major NPCs (Minsc, Irenicus, Imoen, etc), and remove all but one or two of mostly-naked Royo pics. That way folks can still have their eye-candy if they want it, but most of the pack is dedicated to more serious character pics.

 

Thanks for your opinion Kalshane. The BG advice and Royo advice is good. The IWD advice wasn't though. How am I supposed to know which ones you think suck? I personally like a lot of the IWD portraits, and use them almost exclusively for my characters. The BG portraits I don't think really fit in with the artistic style of the game, and I think only two of the female and maybe 3 of the male Royo portraits are worth a damn. It all comes down to personal preference.

Now that I've got too many portraits to fit in portrait.mes, I am left with a choice. I can use my personal judgment and remove some of the existing ones to fit the new ones, or I can go back to my original idea of an app that lets you create your own personal portrait.mes file from up to 32 portraits you choose. Both options might impact saved games, though you will always be able to switch back to an old portrait.mes with Front End.

I say "my personal judgment" because I see no way we can realistically poll the members of this forum on what is now approaching 400 portraits. I do not want to try that.

 

maybe we should have a poll to see if we should have a poll.

how much work would this be for you? I like the idea but I don't want to see you stressing over it.

 

Sorry. I wasn't trying to play art critic. It might just be my monitor, but the vast majority of the IWD portraits look like crap on my screen. Not in the "what a sucky artist" sense, but in a "something is seriously wrong with the color/contrast values" sense.

 

Blue, if people don't like what you offer in the way of a portrait pack, then let them learn how to do it for themselves. We trust you to pick some good ones.

 

yeah Blue i dont have a problem giving you final say since your doing the work and like spike said if i dont like it then i sould do my own. dont really want to do that i rember the first time i tried adding my own portraits and the hours of fustration lol

 

Spike nailed it. CB has never given anyone cause to question his judgement, and if he is doing the work, any discretionary decisions are his by right.

I'm glad to see that he asked for advice, and doubly glad that he obviously took such advise into consideration, but whatever product he puts out is what will be available, and if it isn't liked by some they can always produce an alternate themselves.

 

I vote for this. I think that no matter what portraits one person picks, there will be some people who love them and some people who hate them. I personally only use a handful of the portraits provided because I don't like most of them. While I could be wrong, Kalshane's comment leads me to suspect that others may do the same.

If there was an app that let us pick the portraits we wanted, or instructions on how we could do this ourselves, I think ulitmately people would be happier, because we could all create portrait packs full of pics we each like. Person A could have all women, while B could have all men, while C could have non-humans, while D could have busty strippers, etc. We each could make the pack we wanted. Plus, we could each then share pics from our own personal pack here, and others could add them to their own pack or not, as we liked:

"Hey Kalshane, I like your pic of the dwarf, and Gaear, I like that pic of the guy with sword, and Blue, I like your pic of the woman with the staff..."

 

Thank you Blue.