Portraits question

[Stonewarrior]

HI all, I have been creating characters for my next run through and have grown tired of the Bioware portraits. So, I spent some time last night crusing the portrait sites for the news pics. I have added a lot to my BG2/potraits folder. However, I found it tiresome to have to go to customize each time and then search for the "medium" and "small" version of the portrait. Is there a way to have the portraits show up with the Bioware ones? Thanks in advance!

[Olorin]

I haven't heard of a way to get the portraits to display in the same manner as the Bioware ones. One problem is that the image displayed during character creation is a different size than the two used in game, so you wouldn't have a compatible portrait for the selection screen.

One thing that I do to help with selecting custom portraits is to save them to an alternate folder first. Before I start a game, I look through that folder with whatever image viewer is handy, decide which pic I want to use, and then copy it into the 'Portraits' folder. This way, I only have a few pics to choose from, and I don't have to scroll around trying to find the right one.

If you really want to get custom pics into the Bioware selection screens, you might be able to do it using the override folder. I have used the trick of renaming custom pics to the NPC picture names, and placing in the override folder to change the in game portraits of NPCs. If you can find out what the names are of the Bioware portraits options, you could try the same thing. Rename a custom pic with the Bioware name, and drop it into the override folder. You'd also have to use Paint or something to make a larger version of the portrait for the selection screen, and put that into the override as well.

I don't have access to my BG2 installation, so I can't test this, or try to find what folder the Bioware pics are stored in, but if you search for .bmp files, you should be able to locate them and get the names. You can test the override idea by just using the standard portrait sizes, just use the bigger one twice, once for itself, and once for the larger character generation version. In the game, you should still see the pic, it just won't fill the box (like you see when selecting a small portrait for the bigger one in the custom selection screen).