making my own portrait mod

_DD_

Inspired by

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/88354/pp-enhanced-portraits-portraits-everywhere-overhaul-wip

I thought about making something similar for my personal use. Nothing as big in scale like those and only adding portraits for the most important characters. At first I thought dumping the bmps files into the override folder with the correct creature names would be enough but clearly I'm doing something wrong because it didn't work. I test this with "INNKE2.bmp" (the code for winthrop in candlekeep) and "REEVOR.bmp" (the code for Reevor in candlekeep) but neither of them appears with a portrait despite starting a new game. Can someone what I need to do to correctly assign those portraits to the characters?

mogui45

Maybe there is something wrong with your bmp file format? You can check this post
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=157532087

Humanoid_Taifun

You don't need to match the creature files of the characters for whom you wish to set your own portraits. You need to match their portrait files.
In cases where they don't have any portraits set yet, that is impossible to accomplish by just dumping these bmp's into the override folder. You need to also edit their creature files to refer to a portrait (ideally yours). The easiest way to go about this is to install the mod you are trying to replicate, and then to dump your own portraits into the override folder to overwrite the ones from the mod. (take care to only "copy", not "move", since otherwise you'll lose them upon uninstallation of the mod)

But since you have chosen the harder path of assigning the portraits yourself, you should download NearInfinity. To set it up, you will need to link it to your chitin.key in your game directory. Once that is completed, click "Search" and then "CRE/ITM/SPL/STO..."
This search function has a minor problem, in that it will only search for official names, but characters such as Branwen or Wilson actually have different names and are only renamed on the fly to the names you are familiar with. Branwen's real name for example is "Statue", a name under which you will find a few more creatures. Reading the file names will help you here. TAMAH.CRE refers to Tamah, whereas BRANWE.CRE and BRANWE5.CRE refer to Branwen.
Once you have found the correct creature, select "Open in new window" and click on the "Edit" tab at the top.
There are a lot of entries, but the ones you are looking for are close to the top. Small portrait is the only important one for NPCs whom you will not recruit into your party. The Large portrait is for the characters that you do recruit.

If you are unsure which of the creatures is the right one, you can still open it and then check their dialogue file. At least I find that to usually be the easiest way.

One more issue: NearInfinity will not recognize new files that you have added after it was opened. You need to restart the program every time you drop portraits into the override folder, or you will not be able to find them.