Has anyone successfully changed portraits??

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Has anyone actually been successful in changing general's portraits? I see lots of instructions, but I don't see where anyone has done it. Buildings we know are easy to change once you've unpacked the files, and we see the portraits there, but do they change just as easily? It's not working like it should it seems - the program isn't recognizing changes being made, changes that are the same as the type that do work in the building files section of the unpacked UI.

[Stuie]

While this isn't true for other .pak'd items, I think you actually have to re-pak the file for the portraits to take effect. Not very convenient.

[blindfaithnogod]

you dont need to do that. just unpak the files delete or better yet remane the pak files. then edit the portraits as you need. they should work just fine. atleast they have for our mod.

[PROMETHEUS]

Uh? to me just worked overwriting the originals....

[Teleklos Archelaou]

So there is no need to delete the paks? We got ctd's when we tried it. Overwriting the files didn't cause any visible changes (I'm talking about while they were still in their places in RTW/data/ui/roman/portraits, for example). Which pak precisely is it, the ui_0 or ui_1?

It's good to hear that some folks have changed them with no problems at all, though. I was wondering also if anyone has changed the number of portraits? For example if all 450+ that might come in one in vanilla weren't desired or if you wanted to cut down the size of a mod or something. Can you just reduce the numbers (in all of them, not just in one folder) or would that cause problems?

edit: thanks for the help guys, even if you're located in lawrence, blindfaith ~D (an m-i-z-z-o-u guy here ~;) )

[blindfaithnogod]

So there is no need to delete the paks?
i just unpacked them all. then deleted them all. doing a total conversion like we are, everything is gonna be replaced any how.

Which pak precisely is it, the ui_0 or ui_1?

im really not sure. like i said i unpaked them all.


I was wondering also if anyone has changed the number of portraits? For example if all 450+ that might come in one in vanilla weren't desired or if you wanted to cut down the size of a mod or something. Can you just reduce the numbers (in all of them, not just in one folder) or would that cause problems?
it will cause problems. it will display empty spaces where the portraits should be. what i did was just reuse what we had. ie. we did portraits 1-70 as unique pics then just made 70 - 500 or whatever, just repeats of the previous portraits. i hope that helps.
check this out https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showpost.php?p=817161&postcount=30


edit: thanks for the help guys, even if you're located in lawrence, blindfaith ~D (an m-i-z-z-o-u guy here ~;) )
oh wait, i guess im not supposed to help the enemy..... :smartass2: you know what they say............. muck fizzou

[Encaitar]

The portraits are in ui_0.pak. A few tips though:

The number of portraits of each type (general/civillian) for each seem to be somewhat hardcoded into the game, so if you only have say 20 portraits and it decides that family member x has portrait number 35, it may have some issues. However it generally seems to default to the roman portrait set (which is also the largest) if it can't find the correctly numbered portrait for the relevant culture. I'm not sure what happens if it can't find a roman portrait of the right number.

Another thing: if you only extract ui_0.pak and disable it (by renaming/deleting the file), the game won't load. This is because it can't find ui_1.pak if ui_0.pak does not exist. So for it to work you'll either need to extract ui_1.pak too, or rename ui_1.pak to ui_0.pak.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

There's some great help here guys. I want to thank you all for contributing. It turns out that something else must have been causing the CTD when the pak was removed. When I renamed ui_1.pak to pui_1.pak, it all worked seamlessly.

Now, there is a very very big question I have though - the Carthaginian culture group does not have its own folder for portraits. Attempts to recreate one (with the number of pics the eastern one has - which is the group that it pulls its images from) have been spectacularly unsuccessful. I've created carthie building folders or subfolders without any problems, but maybe the fact that a specific image is 'anchored' as the Carth and Numidian starting faction leader portraits - perhaps that is keeping it locked on eastern. Is there anyway we could have other culture group portraits for carth? There are only 127 portraits in the eastern group additionally, so it's a very limited number. ANy ideas or possibilities?

[Dol Guldur]

This is a question (exclusive ct_carthage portraits) I would also like answered; if anyone knows.

[Encaitar]

The Carthaginian culture seems to be hardcoded to use quite a bit of the Eastern culture stuff unfortunately.

[wlesmana]

I'm javing problems with this too.
If I renamed ui_0.pak the game CTDs with no error message. If I renamed ui_1.pak the game will load custom interface for SOME faction but not all. So I can't change the appearance of Roman interface. I guess the only solution is repacking the files?

[Dol Guldur]

I think we need a tutorial.

I do hope this can be solved. Different factions being controlled by leaders whose facial/racial appearance and headgear are the same is just not realistic.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

I think we need a tutorial.

I do hope this can be solved. Different factions being controlled by leaders whose facial/racial appearance and headgear are the same is just not realistic.A very serious problem, yes. I'm not very optimistic that this one can be fixed though. Gah!

[Dol Guldur]

Yep, and as Carthage also shares its 2D building graphics with the Eastern culture that means we only have in effect 5 distinct cultures to work with which will limit some mods to just 5 factions where "very-similarly-cultured" factions do not exist.

It is indeed a horrible fact. I'm not hopeful BI will resolve it, if anything there will be less diversity.

[Dol Guldur]

I cannot seem to get the vanilla BI faction portraits that draw off the old r:tw cultures to stop displaying even when I have modified them.

I have unpacked everything and copied the UI folder to the rome data folder. I have played around with the Barbarian portraits, cards etc. but the game still draws off the packs.

Renaming ui_0.pak and/or ui_0.pak or changing the 0 and 1 all just cause CTDs.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

That doesn't sound good. I've not touched portraits in a while, but we will have to again soon (1.5 that is, not BI). I hope someone will reply here who has had some luck or experience with this. Please keep us informed if you do have success (or failure even).

[Dol Guldur]

I was never familiar with this anyway, so I may be making mistakes.

[Avicenna]

About the changing of portraits...

Sorry if I'm going offtopic but after I installed BI and started a Julii campaign, I noticed that all my generals had changed portraits! I went off RTW for a while, came back and they reverted to the original again! Does anyone know what might have happened?

[Dol Guldur]

When swapping, deleting or editing portraits there is a very great task ahead of us poor modders because you have (in the case of generals for example) not only to change the young general portraits but also the old general portraits, the dead general protraits and then all their card counterparts - and that is without even touching civilians & rogues!

All these files are named the same (000,001 etc). Is there a file tool to synchronize this work?

For example, let's say I wanted to remove images 002,005 and 023 from the roman young generals - is there a tool that will allow me to remove those same filenames from all the folders simultaneously or add new ones in the same manner?

[Teleklos Archelaou]

I don't know that I'd recommend just removing them. I know if one of the sets is removed sometimes it shows buggy graphics (sort of a 'hole' where you can see other things instead). That may just be if one part of the 'set' is removed, but I'd probably recommend substituting another 'set' (a different set of images from another number) instead, so there is no 'gap'.

[Dol Guldur]

I meant removing and replacing. You can leave a set incomplete but it does leave gaps yes. I will keep the same number of images and sets of course by the time it is complete - which might be long after MTW2 is out if I cannot find some good file management tools :(

[Dol Guldur]

Does anyone know of a tool that will enable me to batch convert the dimensions of my large edited portraits TGAs into the smaller counterpart portrait cards?

I can convert the TGAs to JPGs and then batch process the dimensions and then convert them back to TGAs, but this is no good as I lose the alpha layer - and even if I knew how to save/reapply the alpha (which I do not) it just takes too long and I might as well go and do it all manually.

So, a tool that batch converts TGA dimension sizes anyone?

I have PSP 7 and GIMP 2.2 but cannot seem to find it there, PSP seems to just have a batch file format feature.

Thx.

[jjca]

ok, I messed around and got this to work. Here is what I did:

1)fresh install of bi 1.6
2)extracted all the paks with xpak (except the two patch paks which don't seem to extract with the tool)
3)Overwrote my data folder with the unpacked data folder
4)renamed every pak exept the two patch paks
5)replaced the greek portraits I didn't like with copies of the ones I did like for the two Old and two Young sections

this worked fine.

[Dol Guldur]

OK,

http://www.batchimage.com/

There is a 21-day trial piece of software called Batch It! Ultra which will resize (among other things) TGAs. However, when I convert my large portraits into the smaller card portraits the background goes grey and I have been through the settings a dozen times and cannot fathom out the error.

If this tool is useful for you in your mod I would be grateful for any help.

Further, I am in the process of darkening all the skins of the Eastern portraits. If anyone wishes to help in this somewhat laborious task then they can certainly use all of them in their mod once the task is finished.

[Dol Guldur]

Can anyone confirm if using a number of new portraits that differ in number from vanilla causes any problems or not?

For example, in vanilla the Barbarian culture has 151 portrait images from which to draw; what if I only had time to create (say) 40 new portraits (replacing the 151 vanilla) for a mod. I know they could be duplicated but even that takes time...just wondered of anyone could confirm anything either way...do the random sequences call upon a range based on the number of portraits or upon a hard-coded value? If the latter then does this have an undesirable effect in game?

[Ciaran]

I don´t know about BI, but Chivalry uses about thirty portraits for any culture and so far I haven´t seen any problems with it. And they use identical portraits in the "old" and "young" folder - of course the number in those folders have to be identical. You don´t get a visible aging that way, but at least it works. You might want to ask Alpaca how they did it precisely, though.

[Agraes]

I did changed portraits for ATW, it was a pain... all our factions use the same portrait base, huns, because it's the culture that have the less portraits. What I did was a mix of barbarian civilians portraits and some from Viking Invasion - those last ones did need some extra alpha reworking. I used the same version for both young and old characters, and then some resizing for the cards. I put also them in black & white for dead characters.

I can't remember the exact proced I did use, but with photoshop you can automatise a bit the process. Go in file and automatisation :embarassed:

Here a result of our work:
https://img405.imageshack.us/img405/9002/portraits5pu.jpg (https://imageshack.us)

[vastator]

There's a file that describes the factions (can't remember the exact name, sorry:embarassed:) and includes a cultural reference to the faction portraits. As I'm using a Ptolemaic army for Egypt, I just changed the portrait culture from Egyptian to Greek, and all my family members and agents now have Greek portraits. I hope someone finds this useful - sometimes even I don't know what I'm trying to say!:no:

[Dol Guldur]

Ciaran..thank you. It would seem not to matter then, though it does raise some interesting questions about portrait randomization sequences...hmmm

Vastator - yes, the descr_cltures.txt file can have the portrait mapping set to any culture for any culture. This is well known though and not the issue here ;)

Agraes - and indeed the Org avatar compiler - might it be a worthy service to provide a download of all available portraits from current and previous Total War editions?

[satanea juda]

Hope you don't mind if i sneak in a quick question, i want my romano british faction to draw it's portraits from the roman spies pool, how if possible can i do this.

Thanks.

oh and yes previous portraits would be fantastic.

[Dol Guldur]

It depends what culture is mapped to your RB faction. By default it is roman. SO RB uses Roman portraits.

If you want your RB generals to have the Roman rogue portraits then you just use them in the generals' folders instead - but all your other factions drawing off the Roman culture will also get them.

If there is a culture you are not using you could assign the RBs to that and then copy the rogues over.

The files are all in the UI folder of the pak files (or in the BI data\UI (which is not packed) folder for the new cultures).

[satanea juda]

hmm dam, i never thought of the cross reference of potraits, if the greek slot is open in bi i'm not using it so i can switch them to there?. is there a tutorial? I've done a bit of editing on portraits eg; charles manson, peter cushing, jim morrison, and few others, as random generels/rouges for my satanic faction.

thanks for the help, sorry for the hi-jack.

Sj..

[Dol Guldur]

When resizing a portrait to a card image one is left with an image that shows the same properties, apart from the dimensions, as the portrait.

However, some other step must be necessary in order to switch off the background (cards have a black background if you look in the fiiles, which is transparent in-game). Can anyone tell me what needs to be done to the portrait (something to do with the alpha layer I suspect) other than a resize in order to make it the same as vanilla cards?

I have PSP, but any instructions would be useful and most appreciated.

Thx.

[Dol Guldur]

I have located the error.

It seems that, although CA alpha-layered all the Barbarian and Eastern portraits, it neglected to do so with the Roman and Greek (have not tested others).

So before you go through the Roman and Greek portraits, picking and choosing, and renumbering over 478 images and then doing the same for the old portrait counterparts (let alone the rogues and civilians too!) do be advised that you cannot then resize them and have them look right in-game :(

Gah, another huge time-consuming task for me...