If there are already portraits that have good backgrounds, how do you go about splitting a portrait from the background so that the background may be used for other portraits?
If there are already portraits that have good backgrounds, how do you go about splitting a portrait from the background so that the background may be used for other portraits?
double post
Last edited by MIKE GOLF; October 05, 2013 at 04:16 PM. Reason: double post
TWC search isn't behaving so not sure if this was previously known or not... but I didn't know till I had a lucky dig around a trace file...
ref getting more faction specific portraits the game does look for folders like;
data/ui/southern_european/portraits/portraits/young/religion_generals/050.tga
have tested that and it does seem you can have different sets of portraits per religion per culture for generals as well as for priests as shown in the pdf
usefulness of that obviously depends on whether different religions within a culture works for rest of mod, but it does for what I was trying
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I thought that might be the case (why would the engine only use it for one specific folder?) but never tested it. Thanks for confirming it.
Should have a cool effect if after 'reforming' to another religion all new characters have Roman like patrician portraits instead of Barbarian ones for example.
Good tutorial, Gigantus, in case I haven't said that already.
I'm wondering about the "portraits\portraits\dead" folder. Unlike the "old" and "young" folders, your tutorial, vanilla and all mods I have so far checked do not have a "generals" subfolder in here - the general portraits are put directly into that "dead" folder instead. Indeed, moving these portraits into a "generals" subfolder seems to break it: no dead portraits in game for that culture.
Does this mean, then, that if religion-variation portraits are being used then they cannot have their own dead ones?
e.g. Under the greek culture I have "catholic_generals" and "orthodox_generals" ... two subfolders under both "old" and "young". As far as I can tell I cannot create those subfolders under "dead" because the game only uses the one set that is in the "dead" folder itself. So although my portraits are different for these two religions for alive characters, once dead their portraits cannot match their alive ones.
Am I missing a trick somewhere? I see that vanilla has a "dead\princesses" subfolder under southern_european - that is the only occurrence I have come across.
I think the reason that the ...\data\ui\[culture]\portraits\portraits\dead folder contains only generals is the fact that these are the only portraits that get displayed, eg dead members in the family tree. I am not aware of a work around, you may have to use non descriptive pics, eg tombstones.
To test whether the dead princesses pics will actually be used in the family tree instead of the dead wife pic (...\portraits\family\dead folder) is a bit iffy. I mean how often does it happen that the heir or leader marry an actual princess from another faction? Come to think of I can't recall having seen a princess picture (alive or dead) in the family tree, like, ever.
Generic pics might be the way to go. Fortunately some of the factions in question are also teutonic so dead portraits won't be seen in those anyway.
Thanks a lot Giantus you got my respect
Thanks!
Very cool! Thank you!
A bit necro-ing and sorry for that. As I always say, I believe it's better to have all the relevant info gathered in one place.
Now, I got a bit lazy and didn't read all five pages of thistutorialthread, so if the answer to my question is already answered, I apologize. I wanted to know how to change the background picture of the General showing up behind him (or her) in the detailed scroll on the right of the screen. The issue is that when I remove the background from a pic and make it transparent, it shows great on the bottom of the screen, but it's black (the background, not the face) in the details scroll.
I read the whole tutorial carefully, but didn't understand how to do it. Is there another file that the game reads to take the background from? For example, for one faction or culture or religion, I'd like to have a tree (or green in general) background while for other something more magical. Is this possible?
Thanks in advance.
Last edited by Socrates1984; February 17, 2017 at 03:44 AM. Reason: Thread, not tutorial.
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Nope - it's that manual deleting of the background that makes it visible in the settlement detail window and transparent in the unit window. Solid black on a TGA means that the background is totally transparent, eg always has been transparent.
The basic principle:
Choose a picture for the background, shape it into the desired size and erase it's content with the eraser tool, save as background.tga
Choose a portrait and 'cut' the head\silhouette out from it's picture, save the cut-out as portrait.tga
Copy\paste the 'portrait' onto the 'background' and save as '001' or whatever number you require (unless it's a custom portrait)
I have created 50 or so young custom portraits, 50 old ones and 50 dead ones (and I have/want to create another 50 or so). I simply deleted the background. What I need to do is create a background of my liking, erase it, and then copy the custom portrait in there. The manual erasing of the background is what makes it visible in the details scroll and invisible in the unit scroll. This way I can have whatever background I want for each custom portrait.
Just repeating to make sure I got it right.
Thanks a lot!
EDIT: Oh I just saw it! This doesn't work for custom portraits, does it? The ones that go into a named folder and have a particular portrait in descr_strat.
Last edited by Socrates1984; February 17, 2017 at 04:16 AM.
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Your summary is correct, it is common practice to use different backgrounds for different factions. It will work for every portrait.
If you have portraits on a transparent background now then it's fairly simple to transfer them onto your manually deleted background template (don't copy the complete portrait onto the background): use the magic wand and select the transparent background of the portrait, invert the selection (now the 'head' is selected) and copy\paste that selection onto the background. That procedure is described in the 'putting it together' section.
Ok got it this time. Thanks!
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Is there any way that altering portraits would cause a game to give that "uh, oh..." error message? I recently converted portraits in my mod (vanilla ones to what I need), including adding some custom ones for specific characters, and at random times after ending turn the game would give that message. If I reload that game, sometimes the next turn loads fine. Maybe it has something to do with "adoption" events?
Portraits may cause an error if they are in grey scale or indexed format - but that would cause a constant error.
The adoption (or Man of the Hour) event may cause an error if the faction has not got an assigned body guard unit in the EDU. (attribute: general_unit)
Could it be because I don't have as many entries as vanilla? Because vanilla had like 99 entries in one folder, I dont have that yet. In the meantime I will add more to fill the whole.
I've done a RTW mod that only had about 10 portraits, doubt M2TW is any fussier... have you checked them for consecutive numbers (and that numbers of young/old/dead match?
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