Creating a World – Character portraits, creation and use

[Gigantus]

An advanced guide in the creation and use of character portraits. Underneath a teaser of the 16 page PDF manual (had to be packed as it exceeded the limit for PDf files, supporting files included). Lots of illustrations for easy understanding.

Update 3rd May 2011
Added reference to the How to make completely new portraits tutorial
Update 27th December 2010
Corrected chapter about faction specific portraits. It isn't possible.

Introduction

Transparent or not?
Ever wondered how those modders did it? I am talking about the character pictures in the unit view and the character view.
The character picture in the summary will have a nice background and the one in the unit list will be transparent. Have a closer look at the picture below. How to make a picture that achieves this will be explained in the Creating the Portrait chapter.



Who is getting the portrait?
Once the portrait is created, the question then remains: “How do I get it to right character?” Should it be just for one character, only for a certain faction, or maybe just for a culture? Or for everybody?
All these questions will be answered in the Using the Portrait chapter.

Download Link
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Spoiler for stuff that didn't work, died on loading the save: 

Here is one for giggles: the first, fully functional family merchant with traits and custom portrait (he won't marry or have children, being a merchant). Can be used to add princesses to the family tree complete with traits and custom portrait or to spawn agents (remove 'family') with traits and custom portraits. As long as the unit is in the EDU it doesn't matter which one you use as it doesn't appear in the game.

    monitor_event FactionTurnStart FactionType england
        spawn_army 
            faction england
            character    random_name, merchant, age 40, x 105, y 145, family, portrait mansfeld
            traits IAmPrincess 1 , NaturalPrincess 2 , GoodPrincess 1 
            unit    NE Bodyguard    exp 6 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
        end
        terminate_monitor
    end_monitor

[Louis Lux]

13 pages just for general portraits? Got to see this.

[Gigantus]

It is for portraits IN general, not just FOR generals! (I do love those wordplays!)

Guess you could do it in 2 pages without all the illustrations (screenshots). Maybe I should have added ... - for dummies. Sesame Street has got nothing on me!

[Augustus Lucifer]

Looks nice. Is it still in progress? The file I downloaded has a blank "Using the Portrait" chapter.

[Gigantus]

Sorry about the snafu, somehow the PDF conversion got messed up (and I didn't check). New version uploaded.

[Augustus Lucifer]

Okay, new version looks good. One thing I didn't know was the religions part. Is that determined by the 'faction religion'? For instance, say I have these folders:

hinduism_priest
buddhism_priest

and my faction religion is Hindu to start. Then I run a script with set_religion faction buddhism. Would the portraits then change to the buddhism ones? Also, can the religion prefix be specified for all agents, or only priests?

[Aethelstan]

Thank you gigantus!

This is one of the best tutorials I´ve seen so far. Its informative, friendly to the newb, detailed and presented fine.

I´m doing some portraits for IBII and ran into a prob - this was helpful finding my mistake.

One thing I´d suggest is adding something about how to save (RLE-compression?) and why.

+rep and good luck for the 1648 mod - hope we will see it soon.

[Gigantus]

@augustus
as long as the prefix of any character agrees with the religion as listed in descr_religion it should work.

@aethelstan
The compression is a feature of GIMP - reduces the size of the graphic. It isn't vital - that's why I didn't mention it.

[Louis Lux]

Guess you could do it in 2 pages without all the illustrations (screenshots). Maybe I should have added ... - for dummies. Sesame Street has got nothing on me!

Very good tut, you just could have gone a bit more in depth in the image editing part.

Okay, new version looks good. One thing I didn't know was the religions part. Is that determined by the 'faction religion'? For instance, say I have these folders:

hinduism_priest
buddhism_priest

and my faction religion is Hindu to start. Then I run a script with set_religion faction buddhism. Would the portraits then change to the buddhism ones? Also, can the religion prefix be specified for all agents, or only priests?

Is there any chance you can do that for other portraits, mainly generals?

[Gigantus]

Very good tut, you just could have gone a bit more in depth in the image editing part.

Not sure what you mean, more then 80% of the tut is about editing the pic, please explain.

Is there any chance you can do that for other portraits, mainly generals?

The religious sub division is possible for all characters (not sure about the family [son, daughter, wife] and the captain banners)

[Live2sculpt]

Thank you for this guidebook. BTW, what MOD is that cap from? I never noticed that one before. It looks Awesome!!

[Gigantus]

1648 - Der dreissigjährige Krieg

[King Yngvar]

Personally I think it should have been more indept on the coding part, for me the image part is the easy one.

I managed to get this to work for cultures but not for factions. What I did was copying a culture file, changing all the general portraits, nothing else, and changing the name of the folder to match the faction in descr_sm_factions. I tried it on 3 factions, no effect. When I tried it on a culture however by changing the portraits in the culture it worked flawlessly. Is there some text file that needs editing?

[Gigantus]

Did you follow my instructions in the faction chapter (page 14) of my tutorial?

[Eothese]

Thank you Gigantus for this very instructive tutorial, it's been most useful. + rep.
Two questions you may know the answer to...
In the captain banners folder is the 'dead' sub-folder ever used, I can't remember seeing a 'dead' portrait of a captain.
What's the difference between captain_card and captain_portrait, it seems the portrait one is the only one used, do you know when the 'card is used?

[Gigantus]

'dead' portrait - I have seen one for a fraction of a second: I had right clicked the opposing army before attacking and the frame hadn't disappeared yet after the battle. Otherwise there is no real use for it.

card and portrait - not sure, could be the card is used in the 'supporting army' mode on the battle field. Otherwise some mysterious RTW left over?

[irishron]

The only place I have seen dead protraits is in the family tree.

[Gigantus]

Corrected erroneous chapter about faction specific portraits. It isn't possible, aka the game engine doesn't accept it.

[Eothese]

Hmmm, seems the card is used in the lists scroll and portrait when you click an army on the strat map, there are probably other instances where both are used as well. The dead one I think we can do away with safely though (for captains), thanks guys.

Corrected erroneous chapter about faction specific portraits. It isn't possible, aka the game engine doesn't accept it.

Darn it, that was my next step!

[Nefarious]

Thank you for this, Gigantus.
I loathe goofy portraits so badly I've actually sent Where's Waldo-looking family members off to their untimely demise. Other times I would reload after my assassins had eliminated enough good-looking characters until I got their portrait. It's a shame to anticipate your next son's coming of age only to find him...wanting.
What can I say. I have issues.

Question regarding not-yet born characters in descr_strat:
Can the portrait info be placed after never_a_leader?
Specific emerging characters are taken care of in campaign_script, but what about already-alive-but-young future generals?

Thanks for any feedback.