Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Why BG3 character potraits feel bland

I have been thinking lately, why do BG3 character portraits feel bland in comparison to BG2, portraits, I think I have found an answer to it.
Their facial expressions don't tell a story like BG1 and BG2 character portraits display their personality with visual storytelling.
I know this one is a very minor issue compared to all the content you have to create to create an entire Triple A franchise sequel, but,
if I found one way to improve this is one of them.

Give either more expressions into portraits or hand draw each important NPC in NWN or BG style artwork,
I'm sure you have already expressive concept art that you can polish into character portraits.
Minor but important flavor-related issue.

Portrait would be so cool.
If it's not in the gale at release, I guess we'll be able to add some through modding.

No portraits in a Baldur's Gate game really kills the <immersiveness> for me. NOTHING the current 3D character creation can do will replace a hand drawn portrait. One of the first things I'll MOD in.
My fav art pack (for BG2) :

I like hand-drawn portraits in games where there aren’t detailed character models, but in a game like BG3 I prefer to just see the “actual” in-game faces and apparel of the characters. That said, I’d like it if we could have different angles, distances and backgrounds, and possibly even expressions, for our character portraits like DA:O (though I seem to recall the facial expressions available for that ranged from neutral to terrifying rictus). Not a priority for me, though.

It is the same for me. Maybe the portraits would look a bit less like passport photos with a three-quarter profile, but this is not a priority for me either.

Handrawn (or custom made) portraits can be very effective especially for pre-made companions. In more recent cRPG, I do find it harder to reconsile differences between imported picture and in-game model.

I did think DA:O did a great job with custom portraits - I was less fond if inquisition, which just gave up on portrait for our inquisitor all together. With various expression and poses being developed for cutscenes, surely some kind of poprtrait generator could be developed for BG3.

One issue I can see is hand drawn often look MUCH different from the in-game character models, and with the amount of close-ups we have in cutscenes, I wonder how off the characters would look?

Hmm, it occurs to me that this might be another decent use for AI in a game. Using them to create a personalized character portrait for your custom character.

BG3 portraits feel bland because they are passport photos, not portraits. It breaks down to:

- Every face is shot from a direct angle with identical framing.
- Every shot has the same lighting and background.
- No one has any facial expression or emotion of any kind. These faces are completely dead.
- There is no context with props, postures, clothing or backgrounds.

Using such pointless passport pics is a massive missed opportunity to make the game feel alive and give it personality. But this, a.k.a immersion a.k.a making the world and it's characters feel real, has never been Larian's forte. They're probably really happy with how clean and stylish their portrait row looks.

This is also a UX issue. The portraits are so indistinguishable from each other that it becomes harder to quickly find and select the character you're looking for.

I have to say that at first I was rather dismissive of this topic ("Eh, what can you do, most games where the portrait is from your 3D character are usually bad"), but I was somewhat impressed about the fact that in few circumstances where I happened to share videos or screenshots outside of this community I got an alarming amount of comments specifically focused on how terrible these portraits are.

Interesting thing is: the dichotomy between "pictorial portraits" and "3D-generated ones" could be a thing of the past, if Larian cared enough to address it.
There are now a bunch of machine-learning based softwares that can generate convincing pictorial portraits starting from a 3D model.

I think using a 3/4 and 2/3 view of the 3D models' heads instead of the full face view we have now would already make a big difference (maybe with a bit of background that's not to distracting); the faces would look much more alive. With every character's pose a bit different, the heads tilted in a different angle, and a bit more facial expression, the portraits could look much more vivid, while the characters are still easily recognizable. And it would be very easy to implement.

Oh, yes. I’d forgotten DA:I copped out altogether and just showed us a hand! That was disappointing, I’ll admit.


Yeah, personally I’d prefer worse portraits that look like my in-game model than fancy ones that don’t. As I’ve just proved by using CC screenshots for my new Pathfinder WotR character portrait. Of course, a good portrait that looks like the in-game model would be even better, and folk make an interesting point that AI opens up some options here. That’s something to look out for in future games, though I’m not expecting it for BG3. Perhaps some different camera angles and expressions aren’t too much to hope for, though!

They have all the elements that would be needed to create a more gestural/emotive Character portrait just based on the 3d models and animations that are actually in the game. They have the basic faces, the animated hands and eyebrows and such, the stuff we'be seen during dialog scenes. We have the camera, environments and outfits, the lighting, we can see all that in action while we're playing. What we don't have is a way for the player to use that stuff to generate an image that can then be utilized as the Char sheet.

Basically what I'd want is a suite that gives us control over how the model is being animated - a way to set a scene, and then cap that out - as part of the character creation process.

I'm still surprised that this doesn't exist yet, cause it's definitely a winning idea.

I'm also a big fan of the 2d painted portrait, but I do worry (given recent trends) what an AI assisted portrait generator would yield, or what that would signal in terms of art general direction. Working Artists would instantly balk at that move and rightly so, if it tried to cut them out, in favor of Skynet on the cheap. I think something like that could tank the game's reputation overnight if it wasn't handled correctly, so not sure I'd tempt those fates. In 2d I can imagine someone thinking to do the Lensa type grift, you know like scraping a bunch of material from old fantasy Deviant Art pages or Pinterest or whatever, and giving us the Frankenstein's Blender version. If people are doing that on their own for custom portraits I guess it's whatever, but if it's a built-in thing and part of the official game it needs to be 'trained' on material that's above board. I'm skeptical that AIs would be able to give us what we want.


That said, the concept of using prompts to guide the creation of a visual is sound. We just need it to use the player's Intelligence rather than an artifical one. And artworks/elements designed specifically for the task. D&D's product need a higher ethical standard than a lensa or a midjourney. Instead I think they should hire an ensemble of professionals and have like a whole plan to make it really hum.

Basically you still need a writer (critical), an illustrator, a photographer, several Voice and Motion capture Actors (ideally with a background in performance/theater), the 3d modelers and animators, and Volo to direct ya know.

Instead of the director directing a story, the goal would be to just nail down all those familiar archetypal Character tropes that we all enjoy. The animated visual equivalent of all the many Voice barks I guess, with that same sort of broad spread. Distilling the "Character portrait" down to it's essence, and then just iterate the hell out of it from there. All the over the top stuff that works well in theater when you need to get the point across at a distance, that's what you'd want for something like a stylized Character portrait suite here. I'm not talking about needing anything all that avante guard or spectacularly original. Rather those silly lists of "archetypes" that are used in writing workshops, or for branding... The Leader, The Orphan, the Outsider, The Jester, The Seducer, The Bully... The NPC you've already met etc" Just take that sort of concept and keep riffing on it to you run out of room on the white board lol. The aim would be to create enough material to populate a complete tree of emotive cateries of the sort that the player can then navigate in branches. Broadly divided between heroes and villains, but with a branch of each.

I hope someone does it at some point. Somehow I doubt I'll see that in BG3 though. It's been what, like almost 3 years, and I still can't change the color of my clothes. Still looking at the same heads, still looking the same. But yeah, it'd be cool if they shot for the moon. I'm convinced the first game to nail it down would go full legend, hall of heroes status hehe

ps. Also, just a quick follow on thought, but basically what you'd want for an ideal Portrait Suite is a kind of common speak there for the grouped visuals. Something we can all readily decipher and that will take the familiar prompts/categories and use those to produce a list or cluster of related visuals that give the gist. It needs to be organized in a more expansive and engaging way than just cycling through a bunch of presets in a massive list 1-100. This is why I keep saying a suite, cause it really needs to have a structure and a means of engaging the player, tutorializing the portrait making process, so the player feels like an artist when tooling around with it, even if they're sorta still coloring by number with the material provided.

If you can establish the milieu and the core elements beforehand, then break it down the way a dictionary or thesaurus does where stuff cross refs, with all those flashy adjectives leading to yet flashier adjectives, then you don't really have to comb the whole web or the entire history of visual images to get what we need. Like I don't think they need the HAL 9000 treatment for this one. Really this would be an excellent way to slide the B reel material, where the Actors should just go to town. I think they have the material to make rad characters, but in the EA they've reserved it all for the NPCs, but I'd want it where the PC could get in on that you know, cause to me that's more D&D.

Basically if you give the player a wardrobe, and the magic mirror/microphone, you can keep the entertainment right there for hours and hours, before they even earn that first XP point or see a prologue. I had hoped the EA would slow drip more of that stuff, but it's clear they're saving whatever they have for release I guess. So I'm sure I'll be back for that just to see, but damn, yeah. A 3/4 view can go a long way. An uplit vs downlit smile or frown, like pretty much anything. I'd be happy just getting to change the background to simple color gradient, but what I want is the whole creature feature workshop! Someday, maybe

I'd use Volo and the magic mirror or magic paintbrush idea. Doesn't necessarily have to be all fully set up prior to the starting game - this could be something the player gets to change early on in the adventure. Some kind of surrealist interlude would be cool for that, like you could play with something narrative that allows for adjustments midway hehe. Short of that I'd take Mombi's massive cabinet of heads, preset - some scowling, some grinning, some doing Spock eyebrow etc. but I'd still want to see more way heads more than whatwe're getting right now. 500 probably would do the trick

Catch you all next round

Even just something like the promo material could work I guess:



Having portrait pictures based on one of those kind of shots would be recognizable and also have that hand drawn look

They would clash with the custom character portraits.

Oh, yeah, I wasn’t thinking of an AI that scraped images from the internet when I saw that suggestion, but one trained specifically to create fantasy RPG portraits using concept art produced by the studio (plus probably other licensed art) as inputs and capable of placing a likeness of a character generated in game (by the player or devs in the cases of NPCs) in a portrait. I definitely think something like that has potential and, given the in-house art team couldn’t feasibly create hand drawn portraits for every single combination of CC choices, let alone every goblin, duergar, etc, it doesn’t feel as though it would be doing anyone out of a job.

I do think there’s potential there, though as you say it’s not actually required in order to create better portraits than we have currently.

Photo modes aren't exactly a niche concept though, aren't they? They tend to ba a standard feature of modern AAA. I am currently playing Midnight Suns, that has a basic photo mode (both in game, and post missions photoshots) and those can be turned into portraits for your homebase. I have no clue how much work a feature like that would take, but I think it should be possible to create a fairly intuitive portrait creator with a variety of poses, expressions, backgrounds, filters, lighting uptions etc.

it seem like good news for yall? new portrait system and naming system?

Excellent !