16 réponses à ce sujet

[NWN DM]

Just got copies of BG and BG2 from gog.com... really looking forward to playing these classics again after all these years.

Where can I find custom portraits these days? 

I remember having literally thousands of them before, turning as many as I could into NWN files when it first came out.  But that was 4+ computers ago....

Thanks in advance.

[igneous.sponge]

Well, here's a list of portrait sites. Scrounging around digital art sites could prove fruitful, too.

[NWN DM]

Thanks!

Much appreciated....

Modifié par NWN DM, 28 décembre 2010 - 05:20 .

[CoM Solaufein]

www.ladynightshade.com/  Find some right here.  

[Son of Imoen]

My personal favourite is www.kirith.com/portrait/ for the ease of browsing by race/class/gender. But it can't hurt to take a look around the whole list, for most portrait site's have their own 'atmosphere' portrait-wise. You might find some dead links though.

Modifié par Son of Imoen, 28 décembre 2010 - 11:55 .

[Seagloom]

My apologies to NWN DM since this post will not help him any. I was wondering if I am the only one who prefers creating her own portraits? I rarely found a pair that felt quite right to me. Everyone's cropping criteria seemed to differ from mine, and often image quality was degraded somewhat. I would recognize much of the source art used and could find higher quality versions online. Tedious as the work was, it felt more satisfying to do my own work.

Modifié par Seagloom, 29 décembre 2010 - 12:35 .

[Matuse]

That Ladynightshade site has some funny ones. In the human females category, look at the bottom right hand photo of page 11, and the second to last on the bottom of page 12.

[Bhryaen]

Seagloom wrote...

My apologies to NWN DM since this post will not help him any. I was wondering if I am the only one who prefers creating her own portraits? I rarely found a pair that felt quite right to me. Everyone's cropping criteria seemed to differ from mine, and often image quality was degraded somewhat. I would recognize much of the source art used and could find higher quality versions online. Tedious as the work was, it felt more satisfying to do my own work.

Actually I've had a similar experience. I've seen a number of good large portraits which then simply shrink the entire thing into the small portrait or that crop them with otherwise unidentifiable paraphernalia still in the frame. But in answer to your Q, I don't do my own simply because I don't know how. That may be one big reason why more people don't, although I suspect most people are fairly content with the ones they get and are more interested in other aspects of the game.

I've experimented with the Paint program but when I try to shrink large photos even just a little to make the cropping work, the pixels get botched, so it turns out to be not worth it. I can handle tediousness, but repeated failures are discouraging. I also found a portrait editor online which seems to have links in multiple places- Andy Kelts' Portrait Manager which is here among other places- but, after downloading from every site that had it, none seemed to work. If you know a way for the layperson BG player to edit portraits, do tell!

[igneous.sponge]

Personally, I don't use any portraits from those sites. They're not really to my taste, and I'm really not into celebrity heads being photoshopped into baldurised portraits.

If I'm looking for something different, I usually convert a NWN portrait, using GIMP to crop to the proper dimensions and spruce up colour vibrancy. I don't have the skill to create my own, sadly.

[Bhryaen]

Thanks again, igneous.sponge! I'm in the process of learning how to use GIMP now- may take some doing...

Although I agree with you entirely about celebrity-based portraits (and would add in LotR ones, ones outside the BG genre, and most of IWD, NWN, and even BG1 & 2 ones), I know there are a lot more out there. In fact, the site you mentioned is the best- links to the widest variety of sites, including the other ones mentioned in this thread. Peppered in among the dismissibles is a quality minority with an even fewer rare ones. I just try to be selective, kind of like when I'm rolling a new char & watching for good rolls. It just takes plenty of time. I don't want to just jam portraits into my Portraits folder because the custom portrait selection engine of BG's char creation isn't particularly user-friendly. Among my perusals of the web I found these two sites as the best (but not only) source:

This one has a HUGE amount of BG-specific portraits- 4000+- albeit many repeats and redos. It's not easy to download one at a time though because in order to get the .bmp version you have to click the photo & download a separate .RAR for each portrait, but there is an option to download the entire lot as .bmp, so I've done that- very easy to simply delete or select as I go.

This one is easier to select online but fewer to choose from. In order to get the .bmp version you have to click to open each portrait in a separate window and right-click-save from there.

There's another somewhere that I got all the NWN portraits from in BG format, but I can't locate the source now. You probably already have those already anyway...

[Seagloom]

I am afraid there is no trick to how I do them, Bhryaen. My approach has changed over the years depending on what programs I had access to. What I do these days is open an artwork in Irfanview, resize it, and then crop it in MS Paint. I made my custom avatar for these forums using the same process. Usually trial and error is involved. Sometimes I will need to try out a size only to find it is too big when cropping it in Paint. Getting it just right takes patience. There are times when I hit a satisfactory result on my first try, but those are rare. Using my forum avatar again as an example, it took me three attempts before finally nailing it.



I feel the results are worth it, though. It opens up all sorts of possibilities from modern fantasy art, to drawings a friend of mine does specifically for me. I did get used to it eventually too. These days I find it rather painless, but I can understand if someone starting out feels the process is aggravating.

[Son of Imoen]

a useful tool to get the image size exactly right once you're happy with the picture you created is the freeware tool PixResizer: bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm. You can type in the exact size a BG bmp image should be. I use Window's Paint to select the portion of the artwork or photo I want to make a portrait of, select 'copy to' and save as bitmap, then use PixResizer to get the right size. Just click deselect 'maintain aspect ratio' or try selecting the part of the image again to get the right proportion, then type in 110x170 or 38x60 and make sure you choose file type 'same as original' (as default for PixResizer is to save as jpeg) and save your portrait as bitmap with a filename max 8 characters long.

Modifié par Son of Imoen, 30 décembre 2010 - 11:26 .

[Urdnot_Write]

I've recently decided to play through this game again and wanted to make my own portraits.



I used PIXresizer to resize and convert my JPEGs into BMPs, and they now show up in the Custom section when selecting portraits. However, both during character creation and in the game they appear as stone-cut silhouettes with question marks where the faces should be. Additionally, while I can select them with ShadowKeeper under Change Portrait, and confirm them using [OK], I cannot [Extract] them with the tool.



Since the problem appeared to be the inability of BGII to display my pictures, which were admittedly high-resolution prior to resizing, I tried to use an Icewind Dale portrait simply by moving it to the Portraits folder. It too shows up under Custom during character creation yet similarly becomes the stone-cut outline.



Any suggestions?

[igneous.sponge]

Urdnot_Write wrote...

Any suggestions?

Make sure you save the BMPs with the proper colour depth. BG2 will only accept 24-bit BMPs or lower.

[Urdnot_Write]

igneous.sponge wrote...

Make sure you save the BMPs with the proper colour depth. BG2 will only accept 24-bit BMPs or lower.

It seems likely that this is the problem.

How would I modify my images to 24-bit using Paint (or another free program)?

[Urdnot_Write]

igneous.sponge wrote...

Make sure you save the BMPs with the proper colour depth. BG2 will only accept 24-bit BMPs or lower.

Checked.

The BMPs are using 24-bit color depth, as were several of my previous attempts. Apparently that is the default setting for Paint files, so it doesn't seem to be the problem.

[Urdnot_Write]

In order to confirm that color depth was the problem, I took the Icewind Dale image and reduced it to 256-colors. I still cannot [Extract] it with ShadowKeeper but the image does appear correctly in-game. It's an unfortunate work-around as the picture quality is significantly worse, but it's better than nothing.



I'll consider this issue resolved.