Creating a World – Character portraits, creation and use

[AnthoniusII]

My post edited.
Edit:
Problem was in the descr_cultures text entry for greek portraits!
Thank you!

[Gigantus]

Great to hear - have fun with the new portraits!

[AnthoniusII]

Great to hear - have fun with the new portraits!

Just one more question.
Can i make them the same way we make ui unit cards?
For example:
Crop the image with crop tool in th edimantions 69x96 ,make the background in alfa chanel black and the head white.
Although i managed to create high detailed unit cards but faces seam to look quite plure.

The character's image created the same way as the ui cards.
I use photoshop:
What can i do exept more sharpen to make the image look more "clear"?

[Gigantus]

The manual will explain how the same portrait is used for battle and strategy map. There are no different portraits for that, just the background changes if you followed correctly the instructions of making the portraits.

Somewhere on these pages there was a post on how to do it in photoshop.
To make it clearer increase contrast a bit and sharpen.

[Calminion_Arandur]

Does anyone know of any portrait mods that replace all the general (or more) portraits with ones that all look better and maybe get rid of the bald ones (or at least most)? Thanks!

FritzRKS

[Gigantus]

Most of these are 'sub mods' of full mods. You will have to go through those sub forums, Stainless Steel or Deus Io Vult might be a good place to start.

[Danya82]

I want to make the portrait of faction leader of Novgorod. Followed instructions in this document exactly, but nothing happens. I am playing DLV/BB Imperial Campaign. Pls, help me, how to ad portrait only to my faction leader. Having all images in proper format, but prolly, i have to place files in some folders or write a text in some files. All, what was in this document i did, exactly followed the instructions.

[Gigantus]

That would be page 14 - using the portrait, individual. Unless you are talking about using it in the faction selection screen.
For that the portrait has to be in the imperial_campaign folder, labeled leader_pic_[faction_name]
If it is regular use then check the spelling of the entry in descr_strat against the spelling of the custom folder.

[Reno Melitensis]

Gigantus, I am trying to give scripted characters in IB II uniqe portraits, But sadly I bumped into a lot of trouble . This is what I did, in the ui folder, I greated this folders; custom_portraits--iuliusvaleriusmaiorianus--iuliusvaleriusmaiorianus_young.tga. And after the character entry in the campaign_script I wrote this enty, character Iulius_Valerius Maiorianus, named character, age 19, x 154, y 171, portrait iuliusvaleriusmaiorianus.The command is not getting the intentioned portrait, but a random one, or a unit card for the character portrait, or a blue square when the character page is opened.

Any help will be greatly apriciated.

Cheers.

[Gigantus]

It would be this path: ...\data\ui\custom_portraits\[portrait_name] which then should contain three pics (that's where you made the error):

portrait_young
portrait_old
portrait_dead

And then the entry in descr_strat or the script:

character ... age 24, x 425, y 492, portrait [portrait_name]

I would suggest to use less convoluted portrait names, they don't have to agree with the character's name

[Reno Melitensis]

Thanks a lot Gigantus. I looked into ALex still installed on my old hard drive and found my mistakes, and hoe should I name the portraits. None the less, thanks for your help., your tutorials are a plesure to read.

Cheers.

[Gigantus]

One is glad to be of service

[Geoffrey of Villehardouin]

Hi Gigantus,

In your pdf guide you are suggesting creating a folder called Branschweig with subfolders. but 1648 does not have such ui folders for individual factions. Am I missing something? To add some extra generic priest or merchant portraits you would need to create these folders for every faction?


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[MT2W FKoC AAR] Times full of Distemper
Reviewed by robinzx at the Critic's Quill, Issue 31

[Gigantus]

Update 27th December 2010
Corrected chapter about faction specific portraits. It isn't possible.

Page 15

Faction

Several tries and feedback from other modders have confirmed that this is not possible, aka not accepted by the game engine.

[Geoffrey of Villehardouin]

That's fine, I got that. I was not sure if you needed to have everything in two sets of folders: faction and culture. So you only need to place the generic portraits in the cultures folder, nowhere else? I made about fifty slots for Protestant priests by copying the existing portraits over and over, as you suggested in the scripting thread, then I replaced the extra ones with new portraits. Still only the 6 old portrait slots are being used by the game. This beats me. I have made the tga portraits with Corel Photopaint, that's the only thing that was different, but the new portraits work fine when used in place of the old ones in the original slots. Is there really no scripting needed anywhere? Even a new campaign will ignore all the portraits that were not placed in the original slots (i.e. the game will only use those named 000-005, regardless which portraits they are, and will even ignore the original portraits if renamed to let's say 006-011).

[Gigantus]

I described use of religion on page 15, so my question would be: does your folder name include a religion name in the same way as would be in descr_religions (example from 1648)?

religions
{
catholic
islam
orthodox
pagan
heretic
heide
}

The default path for portraits for each culture is set in descr_cultures (with southern_european being the 'ueber' default), nothing else needs to be done there.

[Geoffrey of Villehardouin]

I described use of religion on page 15, so my question would be: does your folder name include a religion name in the same way as would be in descr_religions (example from 1648)?

religions
{
catholic
islam
orthodox
pagan
heretic
heide
}

The default path for portraits for each culture is set in descr_cultures (with southern_european being the 'ueber' default), nothing else needs to be done there.

Thanks for not giving up. The folder is called orthodox_priests. It seems to work fine, it is your default folder. Here is an example with the original images replaced with new ones.

New campaigns pick them out always in the same order: priest 000, 002, 001, 003, 004, 000, etc, regardless which portraits have been given those numbers. If I restart the campaign and recruit priests, it seems to always be the same order, the same priests every time. And it will ignore portraits with higher numbers, not originally in the mod (i.e. 006 and above). So there seems to be a pseudorandom selection somewhere that only selects portraits from a defined set, in the case of priests 000-005. Once you are far into the campaign, priests, merchants and diplomats have several identical twins, despite there being very many other new portrait choices to pick from.

[Gigantus]

That is indeed rather odd, I wasn't aware of this. I will have a look into this as soon as I get some time. Best will probably to simply use numbers instead of the actual portraits to see what is happening.

Edit: I just spawned 15 priests for Schweden (england) and created 12 numbered portraits for them (See attachment, path is ...\data\ui\southern_european\portraits\portraits\young\orthodox_priests).

This is the sequence of the used portraits: 3,0,4,3,8,7,9,6,11,10,2,1,5,0,4 - all 12 portraits are present with 3 duplicates.

Spawn details (bottom left of the map):

spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 1
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 2
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 3
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 4
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 5
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 6
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 7
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 8
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 9
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 10
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 11
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 12
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 13
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 14
spawn_character england, random_name, priest, age 40, x 1, y 15

[Geoffrey of Villehardouin]

What can I say, it is indeed strange. Maybe I should come back to the game tomorrow. Here is the list that was generated with the portraits you sent me:

The same order as before: 000, 002, 001, 003, 004, 000. The most I can generate is with Utrecht Union, turn 2 (7 priests). Their portrait numbers are every time the same.

[Gigantus]

Enter the 15 spawn_character lines to the campaign_script file, right under the 'script' line and then try Schweden.