Help with portraits please.

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I downloaded the icewind dale portraits frpm this site and put them in my portrait map, however they do not work when I try to use them. What's wrong? Also do anyone now where I can find the icewind dale II portraits? I know I can extract them but I dont know how to resize them and still make them work somehow.

 

Strange, if you get the portraits from BG2 section they should work without problems. You did check the 'Custom Portraits' when choosing one in the generation screen, yes? They should be there.

 

yes the files are there, but the figure with a ? shows up when I select them. I have tried to rename the files, but to no success.

 

Portrait Manager

This helped me out when I started using new portraits.

 

The '?' will appear if the portrait is not up to standart format BG2 uses. I do not know the details but it is a common problem.

You have to convert the corrupted portraits into right format. If you want to do it manually, simply open a working portrait, delete it, copy&paste the troubled portrait you want into now empty portrait, and save it as different. (do not overwrite or you will lose the existing portrait) I know it is a lot of trouble, but it works.

Or maybe there is a simple way of converting BMP to JPG or something like that, but I have absolutely no idea.

Other than that, portrait manager above may be useful as it has the potential to do a lot of work instantly, though I never used it, so I am not sure.

 

Portraits need to be in .bmp format, 110 x 170 pixels for large portraits and 38 x 60 pixels for small. To convert JPEG to Bitmap, the easiest way is to load the picture in Paint (or any image editor) and go to "Save As..." and select 24-bit Bitmap as the type (this will retain the greatest amount of colour information). BG claimed that small portraits would have to be 256-colour Bitmaps, but I've never noticed any difference between the 2 & 24-bit versions other than the increased colour quality of the 24-bit, so I use that. Portraits should also be named correctly: xxxxxxxL.bmp for large portraits, and xxxxxxxS.bmp for small ones. Certainly in BG (and probably in BG2, too) it didn't like names longer than 8 characters. Good ol' Windows.

 

Another thing that can happen is if you add the portraits to the folder while the game is running, it won't recognize them right away. Quit to the desktop and then try again.

 

Thanks for all the help. The problem was what Felinoid described, I had to restart the game. Now they work fine =) Could any of you experts answer my other question I posted on this forum? It's about soundsets.