Alweth's easy Portrait Grabber

Remove all ads!

If you're like me, you've often seen fantasy art and thought to yourself, "That would make a really neat Baldur's Gate portrait." However, the time it takes to get the image, scale it properly into three different files, etc., prevents you from doing much of that unless you plan to use the portrait yourself.

Now, that is no longer a problem! Now the world can be flooded with every possible Baldur's Gate (Enhanced Edition or original) portrait under the sun, because of this simple (Windows only, sorry) app that quickly grabs a section of the screen, scales it into the right dimension(s) and saves it with the proper name(s) for you.

So please go forth and make a bunch of really awesome portrait packs.

Thank you.

HOW TO USE:

0. Run the program.
1. Choose the directory you would like your portrait images to be saved into.
2. Enter the name you would like the files to have. Because of restrictions in Baldur's Gate, the file name cannot be longer than 7 characters.
3. Click on the Capture tab. Click Capture Large, Capture Medium, Capture Small, or Capture All. The screen will go greyish.
4. Select the region you want to make into a portrait by left-clicking and dragging. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Dragging does not work as normally expected! The size of the selected region defaults to the dimensions expected used by the portrait. This means you should start your drag from the bottom-right corner of the portrait rather than the top-left. See the next step to find out how to adjust the top left corner.)
5. When you release the mouse button portrait will be taken. BUT if, while still holding the left mouse button, you press the right mouse button, the behavior will switch so that the bounding box moves with your mouse rather than being resized by it. Right click again to continue resizing.

Notes:

The Capture All button simply takes one screen capture area and converts it to all different image sizes. When you go to capture a new image, the old area will be pre-selected. Press SPACE or ENTER if you want to capture that area of the screen again without changing it at all.

I should mention that the only functional difference between BGEE mode and non-BGEE mode is their default values and the presence of a medium size. So feel free to use it to get non-BGEE portraits too, if you want a third portrait.

WHERE TO GET IT:

From the GitHub page: https://github.com/abrahamwl/portrait-grabber/releases

Source code is also available there.

 

You can change portraits in mid-game. If all else fails you can hex-edit your save file. I had to do this after Unfinished Business messed-up the portrait for Minsc. Near Infinity tells you where to look.

 

I know. I was so surprised there wasn't something like this already. That's why I finally gave up and made it.

 

Alweth, do you expect to make this compatible with BGEE, if it doesn't happen to be, for whatever reason, at release?

I'm holding out for BGEE before returning to Candlekeep again for a new adventure.

 

The Portrait Grabber allows you to specify the sizes of portrait it creates, so, to my knowledge, it should work immediately with BGEE. You just need to set the appropriate size values when you run the program. Portrait Grabber doesn't save anything on your system other than the portraits, so you want to be careful that you set the right sizes every time you run Portrait Grabber.

 

Alweth, I may give this a look when BGEE comes out next month. I'm considering doing my first evil runthrough of the series (after 12+ playthroughs, I've never done a serious evil campaign). Thanks for putting this together!

 

What are their sizes? I might add them.

I probably won't add setting saving, since I like that this program doesn't add or leave anything on your system, and is just the EXE. Also, it would save someone a maximum of about 5 minutes if they end up using my program hundreds of times for something other than BG, while it would probably take me at least 15 minutes to add the feature, so...

 

For what it's worth. I've updated the app so that it works with BG:EE too.

 

Potentially very useful tool, but I'm finding it very buggy and tricky to use.

Some hopefully useful feedback: the Medium picture seems to be the largest of all three, I've had at least two (out of ten pictures I was trying to format) occasions of becoming stuck in the picture-taking part, and I've also noticed there's a one-pixel border on the left and upper edges of the Large and Small pictures.

After some trial and error I've managed to get some reasonably good BG portraits ready, though, and overall I'm very impressed with this little program!

 

I updated the original post to make it more informative and to include the updated download location.