Noob's Guide to Custom Portraits

Kyanite

I recently purchased and downloaded BGEE and BG2EE. I am wondering how a player can use custom portraits for the single player game. I remember in the original games, all you had to do was make a portraits folder in the game's folder and have a .bmp file of two different sizes. Where do they go now, what size, and what format?

Thanks for any reply, and sorry if this is answered someone else. The links for the manuals aren't working for me, and a quick perusal of the forums didn't turn up what I'm looking for.

dreambled

http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/7461/heres-how-to-use-custom-portraits/p1

Flashburn

Go to My Documents -> Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition and create a folder named 'portraits' and put them there. Update 1.2 made using custom portraits more flexible, so they can be any size as long as they don't exceed 1024 pixels in either dimension. They will be automatically resized to fit the panes.

-They must be 24-bit .bmp files
-Their file names cannot be longer than 8 characters.
-If you want to follow the specific method (see below), the file names cannot be longer than 7 characters and must include a capital letter at the end to denote their size (L, M, S).

-Example: "Ranger2L" would work but "Barbarian3M" wouldn't.

Specifically, the dimensions for the portraits are as follows:

Large = 210x330 (used on the character creation screen and ToB's epilogues)
Medium = 169x266 (used on the character sheet)
Small = 54x84 (used on the right side of the UI in-game)

terzaerian

The latest versions of the EE automatically resize the large portrait, so for EE it's all you really need; the medium and small versions are only necessary if you plan on using a different crop.

I use a simple naming prefix for my portraits: one letter for gender, one letter for race, three spaces for numbers, letter denoting the size of the portrait. So a picture of a female elf would be something like:

FE007H.bmp

The letters I use to denote races in the prefix go like this: D for Dwarf, E for Elf, G for Gnome/halflinG, H for Human, O for Half-Orc. Half-Elves take their pick from whichever of their two races that particular character more resembles. I don't factor class into nomenclature at all because that strikes me as being superfluous.

Finally I also do my suffix letters an odd way. As BGEE only needs the 210, I've just added that resolution to my legacy portrait collection (which uses the old BG standard of 110x170 for the large and 38x60 for the small); but as the L and S suffix was already taken by the legacy collection, I opted to give the 210s H (i.e. huge) as a suffix (after the style of NWN's portraits).

Isandir

One thing I've mentioned elsewhere on the forum, which does make a big difference for me, is that the automatic resizing is flawed. When it creates the small 54x84 thumbnail, it creates pixelation in the game, causing that portrait to stick out from the others. Creating that size manually is the only way to avoid it.

Edit: This is what I'm referring to.

terzaerian

I can tell the difference but I can't say it's flawed, really. It wouldn't make a difference to me, at least not enough to want to create even more copies of the portrait and juggle another prefix. H/L/S should cover pretty much all contingencies.