PoE custom portraits

[Sewer]

Heya,

In Nwn II and BG EE i could have one picture per portrait, it will be simply scaled to the frame.

 

Why we cannot have it here, i read the portrait page http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Portrait and it says i have to have 2 pictures for a portrait to be shown in game.

I ask why ?

Why it simply cannot scale.

This is one of the things that frustrated me about original NWN and BG. IWD.

 

It is no pain when you have 3 or 4 custom portraits but when my custom portraits list in in hundrets it really becomes a pain.

 

i recently created around 300 portraits and to think i need to have every file in 2 copies with 2 different names so it shows in game, it really puts me off.

 

Is there a way to go around it ?

 

If so pls share it with me.

 

Thanks in advance,

Cheers, 

 

 

[pi2repsion]

Because what is used in the game isn't the same picture scaled to two different sizes.

 

There's one picture for the character sheet (head and upper body) and one for the UI bar (head and neck, top of shoulders), which is also used for the small heads for selection in the character sheet.

 

So the two pictures depict different portions of the character's body and, moreover, use different aspect ratios.

 

To understand why this is done, try using one of the big character sheet images and scale it down to the small UI bar size without cropping, and you'll end up with character images in the UI bar that look and feel too small. You get MUCH better results graphically when your picture for character selection is based on that purpose and the picture for the character sheet is based on that.

 

 

So the ultimate answer to WHY it is done the way it is is that it looks better that way and the professional artists know this; as professionals, they know that on a smaller selection area having the head fill most of the area works great and that on larger presentation areas showing more of the person works better than just showing the head.

 

 

---

 

You can of course make do with one image, cropping and resampling from the large character sheet image to make the UI bar image, if that's what you want. If you do, I suggest you ensure that your large character sheet image contain as little of the body as possible such that the head fills most of the picture in the downscaled/recropped Ui bar image rather than having the head shrunk significantly in size.

 

You can also automate it with any decent image tool rather than choosing better manual crops by hand, and the quality of that I'll leave to your imagination. As you say you have made 300 images, I imagine you are familiar enough with tools to do this.

Edited September 16, 2015 by pi2repsion

[SubRosa]

Wasteland 2 also used only one picture, that was scaled down for use in the UI. I found that most of the custom portraits I downloaded were useless because they were so tiny after being scaled down that I couldn't make heads or tails of what they were. In the end I found I could only use portraits that only showed the head and a little bit of shoulder - just like pi2repsion said. With Pillars I always take the large image, and then crop out just the head and upper shoulders, and then resize it down. That gives me a UI pic I can still make sense of.

 

So having separate pics for the UI and the character sheet is really not such a bad thing after all.  I feel your pain when it comes to the extra work. That is why the only custom pics I made my self (as opposed to portrait packs I downloaded from the Nexus) are ones I know I am actually going to use.

[Karkarov]

Nope there is no way to get around it, and no it wouldn't be a good idea to try.  As the guy who made the original thread about how to create custom portraits for this game and did most of the UI art design for the IE mod I can tell you right now Eternity does not like it when you try to use an image for a resource or UI element and that image is not the exact size it expects it to be.  Using higher rez pictures will actually result in a worse looking portrait in game for example over just scaling it down to the exact size the game expects.  Even though the size the game is looking for may be much smaller and theoretically less detailed than your original portrait pic.