Faces of the faceless: trying to add portraits to minor NPCs.

[lowryder]

I've recently compiled a load of hand-picked custom portraits for NPCs (a whoppin' 200 of them and counting, over 400 if you count both "lg" and "sm" version; it was... quite the tall order), all properly cropped and with the intent of staying as lore friendly as possible. A lot of terrific ones from the fellow forum users, also!

 

The intention was to share the work with everyone, for players who basically wanted additional portraits for the portrait-less NPcs... but, welp, I don't know how to insert them. I was at my wits' end when putting them in the "data\art\gui\portraits\npcs" folder with the same name format of the existing ones didn't work. Any of the more engine-savvy users willing to give me some directions?

 

I'm also looking for nice folks who'd get a look at everything from a lore point of view and check for issues or omissions. I've tried my best and quite hard at that; yet, truthfully, I haven't gone that far in the game and I've only relied on the wikia to get a grasp of every character it contained (race, body type, role in the story, general background whenever possible). This already means two things:

 

1. There probably isn't everyone who has some proper form of back-n-forth dialogue in the game.

2. Most importantly, you might certainly see some dissonance between the descriptions you remembered and some of the portraits -- I don't really care about the hairstyle not exactly matching the 3D model since anyone would literally have three haircuts and the same face otherwise... same goes for finest clothing details, as it would have been an impossible task lest I made the artwork by myself, but if a guy is described as, say, "skin and bones, with a full beard", I'd obviously wouldn't want to match them with the pic of a chubby, shaved person.

 

Some weren't already on the wikia at all, so yeah, there probably aren't all of those who amount to a little more than bystanders (or backers-inserted).

 

Oh, and some have not dialogues at all, I already know.

 

Here's the work so far. I'm gonna share it anyway; at best someone might re-use them as portraits.

 

https://ufile.io/46lmx

Edited September 16, 2017 by lowryder

[PangaeaACDC]

Unfortunately it may not be that easy to insert pictures in the actual game, at least for this use. Could be you would have to include them in the packages of the game, which means fiddling with them with some program. Maybe Unity Studio would do, or Unity Assets Bundle Extractor.

 

Hopefully it's easier than that, but I mention it just in case you need programs of this kind.

 

Sure would be nice if the game was better set up for mods, but it is what it is.

[lowryder]

Okay... I had written a ****load of text, but my entire post was deleted when I tried to preview. For better or worse, I'll be concise. Still, thanks to Pangaea for the heads-up.

 

I think that by fiddling with the .unity3d models you could do something. There are also some values in modding framework of the IE mod that could help.

 

https://imgur.com/a/PBqsC

[Etienne76]

Still not able to insert portraits for those NPCs that don't have them? I followed the topicstarter route and did not achieve the desired result either. I ask competent people for help. There is no information on the Internet.

Edited December 3, 2020 by Etienne76

[Boeroer]

I think you should tag some devs on order to get a qualified response. Like @Aarik D or @BMac or so. Maybe there's some easy answer to this question. 

[BMac]

I replied to a PM about this - here is my reply:

On 12/3/2020 at 7:15 PM, BMac said:

Hi! Unfortunately, I believe this is very difficult to do for Pillars 1. The NPC portraits on Pillars 1 are linked and packaged in the Unity data with the characters they are associated with (we weren't able to dedicate a lot of time to modding support then).

I dug a little more and I believe you could induce the NPCs to use unpackage textures from the data folder, but you would still need to modify the Unity data to specify the texture paths. This data probably lives in the individual level bundles the NPC appears in, and the property is called 'm_textureLargePath'.

[Etienne76]

Thank you. I hope I can do it, and I think I'll describe how to do it here if I succeed.