A neat utility for portrait production

Atrophiederic

Greetings, forumites!

While browsing on the Neverwinter Vault, I found this little gem:

Portrait Conversion Tool v1.62

A nifty utility that lets you turn all sorts of image files into NwN-sized portraits! One note - it has a very ... interesting ... 3D interface that was, at least for me, a bit disorienting at first.

So, check it out, and start making those portrait packs, y'all!

krynnmeridia

For me, at least, the interface is so bad that I cannot use the tool. The UI is worse than Blender, which is really saying something.

It also doesn't support batch conversion, which is a huge downside.

LaputianBird

Probably the worst UI I've ever seen, it's amazing in its own way.

Furthermore, from the readme:

Fixed - Alpha Channel now fully opaque, removing 'blotchiness' of converted images.

Portrait tgas don't need alpha channels at all, a completely opaque alpha channel doesn't serve any purpose anyway.

Atrophiederic

LaputianBird said:

Portrait tgas don't need alpha channels at all, a completely opaque alpha channel doesn't serve any purpose anyway.

An "E" for effort, methinks! I dunno, it's not *so* terrible, and it produces the portraits, so until I find something better ...

TarotRedhand

If you are doing a batch conversion of 6 or more images to portraits you are probably better off using a batch image processor. The downsides are that you will need to run it once for each size of portrait and you may need to do a batch rename using something like the ant renamer program. That aside where do you get a batch image processor? I know of 2. First there's the gimp plugin BIMP. Being an add-on to gimp it will run on the same platforms and deal with the same file types as the gimp. As far as I can see you can use any gimp command in batch mode with this.

Then there's XnConvert by the same people/person as XnView (get the extended version - it is free). Indeed XnConvert is actually an extracted part of XnView (that means it is slightly faster). Both run on windows, mac and linux and both can input and output in 500 different formats. I personally use both of these. XnConvert for file type conversion (but it does so much more) and XnView as my primary image viewer.

Actually there is a third one but since codeplex was scuppered by ms you will need visual studio to compile it yourself. I therefore haven't linked to it. It is a plugin for paint.net.

Hope this is of use.

TR

Atrophiederic

Thank you, @TarotRedhand for those linky-links! They will be of incredible use, I can guarantee you!

TarotRedhand

Just glad you found them to be of use. If you use the gimp you may find this blog page I wrote called "Hidden Gimp" useful as well. As well as pointing out some less well known features of the gimp there is also a section towards the end that has a lot of links to other gimp addons.

TR

Atrophiederic

I had come across your blog page earlier when I started getting into gimp - very useful stuff, thank you for that, too!