Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Modding The Portraits

Here is an example of an Origin portrait going haywire...



You can see Lae'zel's face is completely silhouetted there.

I've seen this happen at various points with different characters, a couple times with the PC. It's unclear what causes it or how to fix it. Like if it happens by the save or if dismissing and re-recruiting the companion is the trick? I think I've seen it crack off on area transition autosave and lvl up, maybe changing light source not sure exactly, but it shows an example of the portrait that suggests the lighting could be controlled.

I think having the portrait change dynamically is potentially interesting like for status effects, but in general I think it should be more used to cap out a cool image that fits your PC as best as the scheme can allow with these portraits. But then also, if something got broke along the way there like a face completely in shadow, that the player could fix that, by resetting the lighting condition for the portrait or "turning off dynamic portrait lighting" or something along those lines.

Ideally you want the same lighting conditions in the Char creator that you'd see in the portrait, so the choices there can translate. If the player had more to play with here so we could have expressions on the faces and do the angles or crops or colors in various ways for the little status portrait, that would be pretty huge. Part of what makes the portrait tough in 2d is to get something that is cohesive in the overall look from one portrait to the next. Here the portrait is generated from a model and the look is cohesive (we all have the same basic building blocks or the same box of crayons for faces and such, like in MP) so it just needs that last step where the player can customize it so they aren't all deadpan. I'd like to see all faces for all races, however many there are, since we've seen how that can be done. With more control over the portrait presentation and a way to see it before the main campaign is launched, combined with the dress-em up concept, char creation would become a lot more engaging and pretty much endless once you got enough heads and trims and duds hehe.

ps. seeing the darkly lit skiagramed Lae'zel mug makes me think that under the right lighting any of these models could get the mysterious look, which could placeholder for any mod overlay. Like were you can choose your default unmodded look in the case of MP in case the other player didn't have the same model that the avatar/portrait in that case would generate something reasonable. For me the blacked out portrait is a play busting occurrence (happened earlier today, new game in patch 1.) Couldn't get it to resolve, had to start over. Having a a portrait go haywire is a show stopper for me hehe