Search for the Karwal Portraits
terzaerian
Member Posts: 232
The Karwal Portraits are a series of Baldur's Gate portraits made from photos of celebrities originally available at http://www.karwal.dk/portraitportal/ by Karsten Dahl (a.k.a. Karse Soze of the Ironworks forums) in the early 2000s. They quickly became very popular amongst the Baldur's Gate community and even spread beyond it - I've seen them crop up as avatars in completely unrelated forums. Many of you posting here I've also seen using them, though you may not know it.
Unfortunately, the Karwal site has since gone down, and only an incomplete record remains at the Internet Archive. I've been going through my portraits collection recently and attempting to outfit all my portraits with the 210x330 copy to make them all EE-compliant, and the Karwal portraits remain the largest hole in that effort so far.
To do so, one would need to have downloaded the Icewind Dale 2-compatible versions of the portraits, as the larger IWD2 portrait is roughly the size of the largest BG portrait. Some of them can still be found on the Internet Archive, but many others cannot.
So my request to you all is this: search your own records if there is even the slimmest chance that you grabbed the IWD2 copies of the portraits back in the day, and repost them here. Or, if you know where those copies can still be found online, post it here as well. Hopefully working together we can reconstitute this classic portrait series.
Unfortunately, the Karwal site has since gone down, and only an incomplete record remains at the Internet Archive. I've been going through my portraits collection recently and attempting to outfit all my portraits with the 210x330 copy to make them all EE-compliant, and the Karwal portraits remain the largest hole in that effort so far.
To do so, one would need to have downloaded the Icewind Dale 2-compatible versions of the portraits, as the larger IWD2 portrait is roughly the size of the largest BG portrait. Some of them can still be found on the Internet Archive, but many others cannot.
So my request to you all is this: search your own records if there is even the slimmest chance that you grabbed the IWD2 copies of the portraits back in the day, and repost them here. Or, if you know where those copies can still be found online, post it here as well. Hopefully working together we can reconstitute this classic portrait series.
Post edited by terzaerian on
3
Comments
Red highlighted items were not found either among my own files or the Internet Archive; green-highlighted ones were. Names in the first column highlighted in red are considered "endangered" - lacking either a higher-resolution copy (from NWN or IWD) or only having the legacy BG copy.
Overall recovering either the raw NWN or IWD copies (i.e. the original archive) of a particular portrait is the most preferable, as these will have captured the portrait at the highest, uncompressed resolution.
Here is a complete dump of the recovered KarWal portraits, available at Google Drive, Mega, and MediaFire:
Google Drive
Mega
MediaFire
They have not yet been organized for use in BG/2:EE, but I plan on making a more formatted release soon. This is simply a raw dump of all recovered data.
Google Drive
Mediafire
Mega