How To Create & Import Custom Portraits

A guide for choosing, animating and importing custom portraits.

Picking your portraits

Wanna use custom portraits? Well I'm here to tell you how.

First off though, you're gonna need to decide if you'll draw your own portraits, use photographs, or if you'll copy paste some poor artists work into your game.

Assuming you're gonna copy somebody elses work I have a few tips you might want to follow.

First off, It would feel kinda weird if you have portraits for all your team, but none of them are even in the same art style. It just wouldn't work out very well, it would look off, and it'll probably bother you a little. Even if it doesn't though, it will bother me, it will bother me a lot.

So do me a favor, and just find one artist you really really like, and then use only that artist's works for your portraits.

Maybe if you're feeling like creating a bunch of portrait packs or something, just use one artist per pack, no more. There are some possible exceptions, like a bunch of artists that draw in roughly the exact same style (for example Sakimichan and Zumidraws).

You might also be able to get your characters from cartoons, anime, tv shows, movies, or even other games, with some well placed screenshots. Might even be able to save yourself the trouble of animating the things yourself (it's easier than you'd think though, to the point where I suspect you'd spend more time trying to avoid animating it yourself than you would just figuring out how to do it in the first place), I mean as long as it's the same series at least, the style will be similar so it'll match, as for tv shows and movies, everything's free game there really, considering it's all photorealistic anyways.

A problem you may have if you use that approach though is that you may want to cut the character/portrait away from whatever background it's at when you screenshot it, which requires a little bit of photoshop know-how. Leaving the background in is an option though.

So yeah, these are really the biggest considerations you need to make for picking your artist.

For those of you who aren't really into the art scene, here's a couple of artists I can recommend for you in no particular order, just look through their galleries and see if you find anything you really like.

• Elsevilla[www.deviantart.com] (Manga inspired illustration style, vibrant colors)
  
• Raichyo33[www.deviantart.com] (Cross between western comic and anime style)
  
• 88grzes [www.deviantart.com](Realism, this guy's done a bunch of MTG artwork for example)
  
• Marc Brunet[www.deviantart.com] (mostly semirealism, with the occasional dip into more stylized work)
  
• Zeronis [www.deviantart.com](Top tier anime tiddy!)
  
• wlop [www.deviantart.com](Semirealism)
  
• Dandon Fuga[www.deviantart.com] (Semirealistic anime tiddy!)
  
• MagicnaAnavi[www.deviantart.com] (Semirealistic Portraits)
  
• Stanley Lau[www.deviantart.com] (The real pro!)
  
• Kushinov Ilya[www.deviantart.com] (Anime style)
  
• Alpenfleger [www.deviantart.com](Realism; another MTG artist)
  
• Sakimichan [www.deviantart.com](Semirealism pinups)

These are just a few off the top of my head, you know, the SFW ones :D or well, mostly sfw, some of these actually do NSFWs, just not actually in their DA galleries.

If you want to sniff out other great artists, the best place to do it is a website called Artstation. Most of the pros end up there.

Just remember the rule. One art style (which typically leads to one artist!) for all your portraits, or I will find you, and I will make you regret it!

Setting Up

First off, you'll need some third party programs. These are:

1. Wizardry 8 Portrait Editor
   
2. Cosmic Forge Editor
   
3. STI Editor
   
4. An image editor capable of creating 8-bit indexed 256 color palettes; and 8-bit files to use them. Also known as Photoshop. (Download the Adobe Photoshop free trial here[www.adobe.com]; On using other software, I have had several people trying to replicate the steps taken in the guide in GIMP; most of them didn't manage to get it to work. It's theoretically possible to do this on other software, but if you are trying to use something else than Photoshop, and something goes wrong, the problem is most likely that you're not using Photoshop. It's a matter of compatibility really, you need to output images/files that are compatible with the wizardry 8 game engine, a near-exact match to the format used in the original game, we have in the guide a documented way to get Photoshop to do this, those methods may not work in your software of choice, consider yourself warned.)

These are increasingly difficult to find on the internet, so I downloaded all of them and zipped them up and tossed them onto google drive, just for you.

Link[drive.google.com]
Alternative Link (replace ,com with .com): mediafire,com/file/r5qjm0u9nzef99p/Wiz8Edit.rar/file
(Valve apparently does not like mediafire and do not allow direct links, sorry for the inconvenience)

Inside are the aforementioned programs (besides photoshop), along with an STI Viewer which you don't really need, but I just thought since I was backing things up anyways, why not include it as well?

There's also more, there's a PDF copy of Zombra's guide[docs.google.com] for how to create and import custom portraits for your offline convenience, it may explain certain things that I will not (for example how to use photomanipulation techniques to animate your portrait; I don't use such gimmicks personally, I do it all by hand).

But there are also things I will explain that are not explained in that guide (like animating by hand, like a real artist). Either way you know, if my guide is confusing to you, there's an alternative for you. This is the guide I used to learn most of the process, but I ended up throwing in a few personal touches, and I just didn't want this information to be lost so I backed that up, and now I'm creating this guide to even further prevent the loss of this data :D

Moving on, there is also a set of example portraits, the original artist is fumio(rsqkr) but the animations were done by yours truly. There's a total of 4. This is what they look like:


There's also NoAnim.tga for your lazy a** purposes (e.g. for when you want to import a portrait but are too lazy to animate it, and of course also for testing purposes when you're feeling uncertain you did sh*t right.)

And finally a readme. A readme that basically just tells you to go read Zombra's guide. You don't need the readme though, because you have this guide.

Lets get started.

1. Extract portrait.zip and move "Wizardry 8 Portrait Editor.exe" to your Wizardry 8 installation directory (The folder where Wiz8.exe is)
   
2. Extract CosmicForge_UNICODE.rar into it's own folder, also extract the contents of D3DX9_43.rar and FreeImage.rar into the same folder.
   
3. Extract STI-Edit.rar to it's own folder.

Now that that's over with, let's make some portraits!

Make some portraits!

Now I'm assuming you either already drew the portrait you want to use, or picked one from an artist of your liking.

Now it's time to prep it for importing it to wizardry.

1. Open the Wizardry 8 Portrait Editor(.exe)
   
2. Browse to a human-like portrait (I mean elves and hobbits are fine, it just needs to look roughly like a human so that it's expressions are readable to you)
   
3. Hit the 'export all' button.

Here's a screenshot of the thing for future reference.

Take special note of that little white line that's really damn hard to see that indicates which file is selected, it'll be important when you need to import things to be able to see which file is selected.

Anyhow, now that you've opened the portrait editor, a new directory has been created called 'Portraits' and inside this folder are all the pictures you just saw in the editor for your selected portrait (e.g. the Large, Medium, Small variations of the portraits, and the animations which are for the medium size only). I want you to create a new folder in here, and name it something like 'Reference' and then move all these files into that folder so that you don't lose them, and so that they won't be getting in your way when you don't need 'em.

Now it's time to do what we're all here for.

1. Open your chosen custom portrait in photoshop
   
2. Open the 'Large' file from your references in a separate tab in photoshop
   
3. Open the 'Small' file from your references in a separate tab in photoshop
   
4. Navigate to your custom portrait, select all (ctrl+a) and copy (ctrl+c)
   
5. Navigate to your 'Large' file in photoshop and paste (ctrl+v) the custom portrait in. Then transform it (ctrl+t) into the right place and right size for the 'Large' file.
   
6. Repeat the process, this time copying from the 'Large' file to the 'Small' file.
   
7. Create a new folder in your Portraits folder, name it something nice (like the name of the character or class or something you intend to use your custom portrait for)
   
8. Save your edited 'Large' and 'Small' files in that folder as .TGA files. Name them 'L' and 'S' respectively. When prompted, select the 16-bits/pixel option. (WARNING: It seems like a new version of photoshop cc has moved this feature to somewhere else, I currently don't know what happened to it but if you can't figure out how to set the bit depth to 16 bits per pixel in photoshop, just try using another program (like GIMP or an older version of PS) for this step!)
   
9. Create a new file in photoshop, create it from clipboard (right now your clipboard should be your copy of your 'L' file. The result should be a 180x144 empty canvas. Then paste your 'L' image in.
   
10. Go to Image>Image Size... and resize the image to 90x72 pixels.
    
11. Unlock the current layer, rename it to "Medium"
    
12. Save your work as a PSD file ('W.psd', W being short for work maybe) in the same folder as your 'L' and 'S' files.

Animate some portraits!

Okay, now we've already gotten to the main part! This is the part that separates the wheat from the chaff! The men from the boys! The great from the losers! The doers from the thinkers!

Animating the portraits!

If you're a loser or some kind of chaff, you can just skip this section. Yeah just in the next section where you import your portrait, just use the NoAnim.TGA file instead of the animations.

If you're not gonna be a baby however, if you want your portraits to actually function, you gotta bear with me, because it feels really weird in Wizardry 8 when you have portraits that don't blink or move their mouths.

Now animating sounds intimidating, kind of as intimidating as drawing when you don't know how, but times 10. The truth however is, at least in this specific case, that it's easy as hell, and any 12 year old could figure his way through it.

You want to know how long it takes me to animate a wizardry 8 portrait?

It takes me a grand total of 15 minutes. 10 if I'm really in the zone, 20 if I hit some kind of snag on the way.

The first time it took a bit longer, but longer as in 30 minutes, not 30 years. Trust me, it's super easy, and it probably won't take you even an hour to finish all the animations for your first portrait, and your second one will definitely be faster, and it will also look better!

Let me explain how small of a task this is.

There are 9 frames. So 9 images to edit, or so you'd think, but there's actually only 7 you need to edit. You see frame #1 and frame #6 will both just be a direct copy of the original image, and you only need to make 4 variations on frame 1 (frame 1 is the eye/s, you gotta make them blink, that's about it.) and 3 variations on frame 6 (mouth open, mouth more open, frown or gritting teeth)

And remember the beauty here, is that you don't have to think of this as animation, no you're just editing an existing picture. Just editing 7 minor variations of a picture. And you want to know the best part?

We're working at a tiny resolution here! Literally 90x72 pixels, I mean god, what do you have a 1920x1080 display? Even from the time Wizardry 8 was made, 90x72 was tiny! Now? Now it's just a fraction larger than your windows start button!

When you're editing this stuff, you have to zoom in, like 1000%, maybe even 1500%! You'll be zooming in so close that all you'll see are pixels. And you know what pixels are not? They are not a face, they are not detailed images, they're only like really really vague dots that imply an image at this point.

What this means really is that you have a MASSIVE margin for error, a gigantic, colossal humongous margin for error. So even if you screw it up a bit, nobody's gonna notice, heck, you might not even notice it yourself! Because it's so tiny! and when you're in the game, you're only gonna see it for like a fraction of a second from time to time so you don't really have time to see any of those mistakes in the game. I mean you have to mess up really damn bad for things not to work out, so relax. This is not going to be hard man :D

(Ever wonder why pixel art games are so popular these days? This is one of the reasons, it's just this huge margin of error, it makes it so much easier to create and animate stuff, so much so that a lot of people who aren't even artist try their hand at it and succeed! big time!)

Now that the pep talk is over, lets dive into it!

If at any point you are confused, remember that there are example PSD files in the rar file you downloaded at the start. Use them, if you ever feel lost or are starting to wonder if you're doing it wrong. They're great examples of how it should look when it's done right.

Here's how to select 100% blue color. You may need to remember this for other parts of the tutorial so take note! Blue is #0000ff. Red is #ff0000, Yellow is #ffff00, black is #000000

1. In your 'W' file (the file you created in the last section with your medium sized image), you now have to use the rectangular selection tool (M) to select the part of your portrait that needs to be animated. For now, lets start with the eye/eyes. Find the eyes of the character in your portrait, and also find the eyebrows. You want to include both of these in your selection. Be careful however, make the selection as small as you can, in particular you have to be careful that your selection does NOT intersect with the mouth.
   
2. Once you have your selection, create a new layer (Shift+Ctrl+N), invert your selection (Ctrl+Shift+I), then select the paint bucket (G) and change the foreground color to 100% blue, and click somewhere away from the eyes.
   
3. Now everything except for the eyes should be blue. Invert your selection again (Ctrl+Shift+I), select the 'Medium' layer, copy (ctrl+c) and paste (ctrl+v), then select the topmost layer (should be the blue one) and merge the two new layers together (ctrl+e) and rename it to M1.
   
4. Repeat the process but this time cut out the mouth instead. You need to select the jaw and the mouth both, and a little bit of space below the chin (1 or 2 pixels below the chin) this is so that you have space to move the jaw down when the character's mouth is open. Name this layer M6.
   
5. Congratulations, 2 animations down, 7 to go!

Here's an example of roughly how each layer should look so far.
(Oops, M2 was supposed to be M6)

Now we get to the animation part.

Now there are two options for animating.

You can either use photomanipulation tools to get through it, if you want to do this, read Zombra's guide where he points out a couple of tricks you can use for this.

I on the other hand use the photoshop brush tool(b), configured to exactly 1px radius :)

That and of course the ever useful color picker (Alt+Click when brush tool is selected)

So I'm gonna show you how real men (read: actual artists) do it. (I'm not even joking, I am an actual artist, but you don't need to be to be able to do this, I did similar stuff when I was 12, and I only really learned to draw passable stick figures by 20, so I definitely wasn't an artist yet I still managed to make an animated lightsaber cursor in like an hour back then, now I don't know how old you are, but if 12 year old me could do this, I'm pretty sure you can too, I was not a particularly smart 12 year old anyways. And what we're going to do here is exactly the same stuff I did back then.)

First off, let me list off all the animations we have to make

M: Base

M1: Neutral Eyes

M2: Closed Eyes

M3: Halfway Closed Eyes (Usually you want the eyes to be partly visible here, but guess this sirtech animator was feeling lazy! naughty naughty! if you scroll up to the portrait editor image from the last section you can see how it should be done right in there, this is the 3rd file in the row)

M4: Scrunched Eyebrows/Squinted Eyes/Angry

M5: Wide Open/Shocked/Surprised Eyes.

M6: Neutral Mouth

M7: Slightly opened mouth

M8: Fully opened mouth

M9: Grit Teeth (or frown if you really can't figure out grit teeth).


Now all you have to do is replicate these expressions for your custom portrait! Like I said earlier, 2 down, 7 to go!

Animate part 2!

Now allow me to show you just how fast you can do this. The important thing is to just do one expression at a time, and always remember: It doesn't have to be perfect. (Quite frankly it doesn't even have to be good!)

For this portrait I'm using an artwork by an artist called Lerapi, and for your benefit, it's both more detailed and zoomed in further than my example portraits were (e.g. it's not as bad of a pixel soup as my example portraits when you zoom in, you can still tell you're looking at an eye or a mouth. Kinda...)

Let's get started!



First we need to get a basic understanding of what we're working with, the above image is there to help you with that, namely the tools you'll need to be aware of. I'm just gonna leave the background in for this portrait, but if you want to remove the background, that magic wand is going to be your best friend, I'm not gonna teach you to use it (it's a simple enough tool), but it's gonna make your life easier.

If you're OCD about some edges in the portrait being imperfect after the removal, then you can just use the 1 pixel brush as shown below and fix 'em. Gonna take a bit of time though (you may notice that I actually just ignored the imperfect edges in my example portraits, because I knew that once I'm in-game and once it's been shrunk to such a tiny size, I won't really be able to see them anyways)

Now once you reach this point where you have a portrait like that selected and ready to import, first off start by going all the way back to the 'Making portraits section' and make sure you finish all that before proceeding.

This is how it should look like, more or less (I also included copies of the small and large file in the document, this is completely optional, I'm just OCD about it for some reason).



Now as you may have noticed there's a little bit of a problem here, a small part of the lips are inside the frame for the eyes, we don't want that, it's quite important that this is not the case, so I fixed it, by using the rectangular selection tool, pressing delete, and then using the paint bucket.



Now select the M1 layer, then hit select all (ctrl+a) and copy (ctrl+c) and then paste (ctrl+v) and voila, you now have a copy of your work on a new layer, rename this layer to M2.

Now select the brush tool (b) and configure it like so.


I underlined all the important stuff in red for you, once that's done, it's time to edit!

First we'll use the color picker (Alt+Click) to pick the appropriate color, in this case for the eyelashes.



Then we draw the eyelashes at the bottom of the eye, wherever you think they'd be if the eye was closed, like so.



Color pick again, and this time select an appropriate color for the eyelids, she's wearing a lot of makeup around her eyes so I think it's safe to use the color of that makeup rather than her skin.



Now cover up her eyes with this stuff, just one pixel at a time, just take your time, do it slow, no need to rush, it'll only take like 20 seconds at most anyways.



And bam, you're basically done, but since I am like I said earlier an artist and know a thing or two, I also felt like it would be right to add a little highlight on the eyelid, just for fun, and to make it pop out a bit. So here!



And we're done making M2! And that's basically just how you'll do the rest of em too, but just in case you're feeling insecure or something, I'll send pics of how I did each damn one to help you along.

M3

Position the eyelashes


Color eyelids


Make the iris more visible

M4

Scrunch the eyebrows


Cover up the excess

M5

Move up the eyelashes


Add some extra eye whites


Resize the iris


Fix the pupils


If you're feeling ambitious, you should also raise the eyebrows a bit (1 or 2 pixels), but I was feeling lazy (as in copying all the color selections I'd have to do and the edits afterwards is a pain in the ass) when i did this so I just skipped it, it's not a big deal, but it helps so I recommend that you do it.

M6

It's the mouth's turn now, we'll create M6 the same way we created M1, but with the mouth instead of eyes.



Now before we start on M7, we need to create a variant with a lowered jaw, to do this first create 2 new copies of M6, then select the uppermost layer. Select the lasso tool (below the rectangular selection tool) and outline the jaw and the mouth, if you want to be perfect, you should outline the mouth's lower lip, but not the upper lip, e.g. your selection should intersect with the middle of your mouth.



Then select the move tool (V) above the rectangular selection tool, and move the jaw down one pixel. (Note: Since my portraits chin is at an angle, I need to move it down once and to the left once). You can use the arrow keys to do it, just press the direction you want the jaw to move in.



Now the jaw has been lowered but some unwanted things happened. Firsly the outermost edges of your selection went outside the frame and tinted the surrounding blue into a wrong color, additionally, since the selection wasn't an absolutely perfect cutout of the jaw, some unwanted things moved with the jaw, although in this pictures case, it's kinda ok since the only thing that moved with the jaw were shadows, and it's ok for the shadows to move (since the jaw is casting them) sometimes you'll get other stuff like hair or clothes or something with it, so I'm gonna show you how to fix it.

Again use the lasso tool, and try to select as precise a cutout as you can around your jaw, but instead of selecting the jaw, select everything around it like this.



Then hit delete. And now your lowered jaw is ready, so merge it with the below copy of M6 (ctrl+e) and name the new layer something like 'Lowered Jaw'.

This is more or less how things should look for you now:

Animate part 3!

M7

For M7 start with a copy of the Lowered Jaw layer rather than M6. You've basically done most of the work already here, all I have to do now is change the colors of the already opened mouth slightly.

To create the shadow/darkness inside the open mouth, you may not always have an appropriate color to pick available for this. If you have to pick it manually, usually you should not use completely black, but just a very dark color in the color selector, in this case I am using a very dark red picked from the picture. Usually very dark red works well for an open mouth, but if there's a nice dark color in your picture for you to pick, then I suggest you use that instead since the color indexing thing we have to do limits your total amount of colors. So the fewer new colors you introduce, the better.



Yup, that's it for M7.

M8

So close to the end! For M7 we just have to open the mouth more, so start this one from a copy of M7. If you're a perfectionist, you will lower the jaw one step further, and also reduce the horizontal width of the lips a little because our mouths pucker up a bit when we open it this wide (at least if it's during conversation and not eating or something).

But I'm not gonna do any of that, because I can get away with not doing it.



Now you could actually call it quits here to be honest, however, I may be lazy, but I'm not that lazy, so...



And lips fixed, and this is done, you might notice I cheated a bit and added the teeth back in while I was at it without making a separate part for it; but I'm sure you can figure it out, if you can't though, you'll get plenty of a chance to see it in action in M9!

M9

This is it! The last one! And arguably the hardest. This time start out with a copy of M6. Now you want to make grit teeth, and a frown. You can get away with just doing one of these things, but I want to do both. Let's start with the frown.



Add some more teeth


Cover up the excess lip pixels from before the frown


Throw in a little highlight for the teeth


Fix the lips


And we are done! Complete animated portrait ready to go! Now all we gotta do is import it!

The lazy way to import

Note that when you use the lazy way, sometimes your portraits don't come out quite perfect.

See here comparison of Lazy vs Proper.
Lazy:


Proper:


Is it serviceable? More or less, for the valkyrie there's practically no difference, for the gadgeteer there's a minor color variation but nothing that really matters, for the ranger there's a major color upgrade but it looked pretty fine before, for the fighter however the lazy way just didn't get the highlights on her anime tiddies right :(

But it looked perfectly fine when I imported it the proper way. So if you experience issues like that, just go for the proper way I guess.

1. In your 'W' file, select your 'Medium' layer, select all (ctrl+a), copy(ctrl+c) then create a new file(ctrl+n), create from clipboard, paste your image into the new file you created (ctrl+v)
   
2. Go to Image>Mode>Indexed Color
   
3. In the Palette dropdown select 'Local (Perceptual)'
   
4. In the Palette dropdown select 'Custom' (do not skip the previous step!!!)
   
5. Select the last square in the palette, and change it to 100% blue (#0000ff). Then hit ok to apply, and then hit ok again to index the image.
   
6. Save as (ctrl+shift+s) M.tga (Or Medium.tga if you prefer). Do not close this file.
   
7. Now for your animations, go back to the W.psd file. Then select the M1 layer for the animation you want to save, and copy it (Make sure that whichever layer you're copying is visible (the little eye icon on the left from the layer. selection thingy))
   
8. Now go back to your 'M.tga' file, and paste. Hopefully everything still looks right, and if it does, then Save As (ctrl+shift+s) M1.tga
   
9. Repeat the two above steps for all your animations (M1-M9), save them all into separate files.
   
10. Open the portrait editor again, this time browse to a portrait you want to replace in-game (because that is what you will be doing, a portrait of your choice replaced by a custom one, you may want to make sure the original portrait is of the same race and gender as the edited one, or the same as your character will be). Tick the 'use TGA-palette' box, then click on the biggest image in the upper left corner and hit import, browse to your 'Large' file and import it. Repeat this for the two smaller portraits to the right ('M' and 'Small'). Then for the animations M1-M9 (or NoAnim.tga 9 times if you're a pleb If you use noanim.tga, import the 'M' file last rather than first.).
11. When you're done importing everything, hit create archive and close the program. Then start the program again, browse to your portrait and make sure everything looks ok, if it does hit create archive again and open the game to test, if it does not (e.g. if the 'M' file is a jumbled mess) try importing the 'M' file again, and repeating the process (Create Archive, restart, Create archive)until it looks right. If you can't get it to look right, refer to the troubleshooting section.

And that's it for the lazy way!

The proper way to import

Here's a screenshot of the STI Editor, which may be useful to you when following the below steps.

1. Open the cosmic forge editor (CosmicForgeU.exe), do the little song and dance of finding your wiz8 installation directory and whatnot, then once that's all set up go to Miscellaneous>Rummage W8 File Collection.
   
2. Next browse and navigate to Wizardry 8>Data>DATA.SLF, then sort it by path and scroll down until you find the "portraits\medium" path. Select everything under that path and extract it.
   
3. Now open the portrait editor again, scroll through it until you find the portrait you want to edit, double check the name (it says it in the little box on the right) and then find the corresponding file with a .sti suffix among the extracted files. Then copy or move that file to "Wizardry 8/data/portraits/medium/" (create the directories if missing).
   
4. Before you close the editor, tick the 'Use TGA-Palette' box, then click on the biggest image (top left) and hit import, import your 'Large' file, then click on the smallest one (top right) and import your 'Small' file. Hit create archive, close the program, then open it again, hit create archive again, and close the program again. If you want to confirm you were successful, open the game, go to the character creator, right click any character to open their inventory, then click on their name and browse through the portraits until you find the edited one. It should have been replaced in this menu (the medium size portrait has not been replaced yet so only the portrait in the portrait selector will have the right image for now)
   
5. Now open the STI Editor, and open the .sti file you just moved to "Wizardry 8/data/portraits/medium/".
   
6. On the left hand side you will see a color index. Take special note of the first color (It should be 100% blue, might be 100% red for some portraits), and the second color.
   
7. In your 'W' file, select your 'Medium' layer, select all (ctrl+a), copy(ctrl+c) then create a new file(ctrl+n), create from clipboard, paste your image into the new file you created (ctrl+v)
   
8. Go to Image>Mode>Indexed Color
   
9. In the Palette dropdown select 'Local (Perceptual)'
   
10. In the Palette dropdown select 'Custom' (do not skip the previous step!!!)
    
11. Select the first square in the palette, and change it to 100% blue (#0000ff).
    
12. Now click save (not Ok, but Save) to generate a .ACT file with your custom palette. It doesn't really matter what you name it, just save it. You got what you need now so just cancel the color indexing thing.
    
13. Now back in the STI Editor, hit 'load palette' (near the lower left corner) and load the .act file from the last step.
    
14. Now go back to your 'W' file, select your 'Medium' layer, select all(ctrl+a), copy(ctrl+c), then go to the STI Editor and paste it (ctrl+v) and your custom portrait should now be showing in the STI Editor.
    
15. Press the right arrow key to go to the next frame (M1), then go back to photoshop, select the M1 layer, copy it and paste it into the STI editor like in the last step.
    
16. Repeat for M1 through M9, then save the .sti file.

And finally it should be done, fire up the game and see if it worked! It should have worked. If it did not, refer to the troubleshooting section.

Extra tip: If you have a corner case where you want to add in a new color for the animations that aren't in the base image (I really don't know why you'd do that or how you'd make it work, but if that is something you want) all you have to do is add those colors into the base image before step 8, so that your ACT file will include those colors, after the ACT file is generated you can then remove the colors from the base image (just use undo or something) and follow the rest normally.

Uninstalling and Reinstalling

Sometimes you just wanna go back to vanilla for nostalgia's sake.

If you imported the lazy way:

Uninstalling:

1. Navigate to "...\Wizardry8\Portraits"
   
2. Remove the .GFX files for whatever you want to uninstall (View the portrait in the character editor if you're unsure which .GFX files this are, in particular, look at the name of the portrait to find the name of the files) There will be 3 of these files per custom portrait, Large, Medium and Small. Remove all of them. Delete if you just want to get rid of the portrait permanently, back it up to another folder if you think you might want to install it again.
   
3. Open the Wizardry 8 Portrait editor and hit create archive.
   
4. It's done, it's gone. Congrats.

Reinstalling:

1. Move the .GFX files you removed when uninstalling back into "...\Wizardry8\Portraits"
   
2. Open the Wizardry 8 Portrait editor and hit create archive.
   
3. It's done, it's back in. Congrats.

If you wanted to replace a different portrait in-game for whatever reason though, you'll have to do it the same way as when you installed it originally.

If you imported the proper way:

Uninstalling:

1. Navigate to "...\Wizardry8\Portraits"
   
2. Remove the .GFX files for whatever you want to uninstall (View the portrait in the character editor if you're unsure which .GFX files this are, in particular, look at the name of the portrait to find the name of the files) There will be 2 of these files per custom portrait, Large and Small. Remove all of them. Delete if you just want to get rid of the portrait permanently, back it up to another folder if you think you might want to install it again.
   
3. Navigate to "...\Wizardry8\Data\portraits\medium"
   
4. Remove the corresponding .sti file. Delete if you just want to get rid of the portrait permanently, back it up to another folder if you think you might want to install it again.
   
5. Open the Wizardry 8 Portrait editor and hit create archive.
   
6. It's done, it's gone. Congrats.

Reinstalling:

1. Move the .GFX files you removed when uninstalling back into "...\Wizardry8\Portraits"
   
2. Move the .sti file you removed back to "...\Wizardry8\Data\portraits\medium"
   
3. Open the Wizardry 8 Portrait editor and hit create archive.
   
4. It's done, it's back in. Congrats.

If you wanted to replace a different portrait in-game for whatever reason though, you'll have to do it the same way as when you installed it originally.

Troubleshooting

• The background behind the portrait is transparent instead of black
  
• When I import my animations into the portrait editor, the blue color is wrong and in-game it's not transparent like it should be.
  
• When I import my animations, the blue looks black in the portrait editor

All of these problems are issues with the indexing being incorrect, and all of them bugged me for a long ass freaking time, but I finally found it out. Originally the guide said to make the first square in the indexed color palette blue, but now it says the last instead, there's a reason for that. Apparently the STI editor and Wizardry 8 Portrait Editor process the indexes differently, which is also why the lazy method has you make the last square blue whereas the proper one is to make the first square blue. So if you're experiencing any of these issues, try making the first/last (whichever one you didn't do last time) square of your palette 100% blue instead of the last/first.

If that doesn't work, export one of the Medium sized portraits or animations from any portrait (well any portrait that uses blue for the alpha channel anyhow; preferably export the portrait you're planning to edit just to be sure, the original one I mean), then open it in photoshop and go to "Image>Mode>Color Table..." it will show you the indexed color palette, just look for the 100% blue square in this palette, and put your 100% blue square in that same spot on the custom index for your edited file. This should solve it.

• When I import the animations into the STI Editor, the background doesn't look blue like it should! It's a different color!

Uh oh, this happened to me once (see the example portrait called 'Liz'), this may end up being something you need to investigate on a case by case basis, first off you need to analyze the original portrait's index in the STI Editor (already saved the file? tough luck, start over from step 7 in the proper way guide to get the original file back, unless you stored a copy of it...)

In my specific case, I noticed that my images were turning dark red instead of the expected blue, and I also saw that in the original index, while the first square was blue, the second was red. So to solve the issue I simply remade the color index for this specific portrait (see step 11 of the proper way guide) but after making the first square blue, I made the second square red (#ff0000). That solved it for me.

In the event that you need to use yellow, you can make it with #ffff00.

Most of the portraits actually do have the first square blue and the second red, but most of them only require the first square to be blue to work right. There are exceptions though, clearly.

• In-game and in the portrait editor, the portrait looks worse than it did in Photoshop. Missing colors/artifacts.

I do not know exactly why this issue occurs, but I do know that the complete solution is importing the portrait the proper way instead of the lazy way (just scroll up to the section about importing the lazy way and look at my example images where I compared the two, you'll see.)

However you might be able to solve or at least mitigate the issue by changing the color palette to match more closely with the original portrait that yours is replacing.

For most portraits the first color is 100% yellow, last color 100% blue and second last 100% red. Remaking your 'M' file with a color palette matching the original portraits first, last and second to last colors will at least somewhat mitigate this issue.


To look at the original portrait's color palette, you have to uninstall the custom portrait (refer to above section) then export the original portrait with the photo editor, and in photoshop go to "Image>Mode>Color Table..."

A more complete solution may exist without using the proper installation method (maybe replacing the first three and last three with the original's colors? Or maybe first 2 and last 3? something along those lines probably...)

• I want to edit portraits for the recruitable characters like Vi Domina and RFS-81 but I don't know how!

Well, the problem here is that the portrait editor doesn't actually read the recruitable NPC's portraits. So all you have to do is use the cosmic forge editor and extract the appropriate large, medium and small portrait .sti files for the npc you want to edit, and edit all of them with the STI Editor, just remember to put the files in the right location ("\Wizardry8\Data\portraits\large" and "\Wizardry8\Data\portraits\medium" and "\Wizardry8\Data\portraits\small"). The rest works exactly like the guide for the 'proper way'.

• My medium portrait/animations are not loading correctly (Proper way)

Please double check that the filepath and filename are correct as described in step 2 and 3 of the "the proper way to import" section. The file path must be \Wizardry 8\data\portraits\medium\ and the filename must match that of the original unedited sti file (you are not allowed to rename the file).

• Using a different program than Photoshop to create/edit images and I am having a problem

The vast majority of people asking for help on this guide are having problems because they are trying to use a different image editor than Photoshop, the easiest solution to your problem is going to be just that, to use Photoshop instead.

Although I created the guide with Photoshop in mind and have some good reasons to do so, I sure don't have anything against other programs (in fact, if there's any program I have something against, it would be PS).

As a rule of thumb, if you're having problems with files created by your program of choice, problems like the Portrait or STI editors crashing, the first thing you should do is test and see if it works with the example files I provided If the example files work but your files don't, either you messed up a step or your program is not processing the files in a way that is friendly towards these editors.

If my example files also fail to work, there's a serious issue somewhere. But if my example files work and yours don't, the only logical conclusion is that your files are off somehow.

Anyhow, in this section I will list solutions to problems other users have encountered and shared with me using different photo editing software. I will also list in parentheses the programs this solution is confirmed to work with, but just because your program isn't listed doesn't mean that this issue does not affect your program as well, thus even if your program isn't listed in the parentheses I encourage you to check if your issue can be solved the same way (and do notify me if it does so I can add your program in there).

• Crashes when importing the TGA files into the Portrait Editor = Disable RLE Compression (GIMP)
  
• If you have successfully imported your large and small portraits with the portrait editor and it appears like it should work, but it inexplicably does not, you can repeat steps 1, 2 and 3 of 'the proper way to import' for "portraits\large" and "portraits\small" and edit the STI files extracted from there manually instead of relying on the portrait editor to do it. To edit them in use the same copy-paste method as described in step 14. Make sure your "\Wizardry8\Portraits" folder is empty if you do this.
  
• ACT stands for Adobe Color Table, it is unlikely for any programs to support the generation of color tables in this format! Although some programs can generate color tables or color profiles (such as an ICC file) which can be renamed to .act, the colors will most likely not come out right. Your best bet is thus to just do things the lazy way, if you do it the 'proper way' you can just skip the .ACT file step (this produces the same result as the lazy way) if you prefer. Let me once again remind you though that you can avoid all this pain by getting a free trial of Photoshop!

Using GIMP

A user who goes by Kernalgohd figured out how to get this working with GIMP; These are copies of his comments on the issue, so thank you for sharing Kernalgohd!

When doing this with GIMP the biggest hurdle is the color palettes. The way to overcome this is to make your own color palette. Go to Image > Mode > Indexed. Select "Generate Optimum Palette", and click "Convert." This will make a color palette based entirely on your image. Go to Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Palettes to open the interface to find what will be called something along the lines of "Colormap of Image # " because we cant edit this, we will make a duplicate of it by right clicking, and selecting duplicate. Open it up and make sure to set the first color to 0000ff. If the original first color is important (like a stark primary color) copy its Hex to another spot instead. Rename the palette to something you understand, then click the Save icon in the bottom left.

Now that the palette has been saved, it will now be in your palettes for gimp, you can find this generally in your C: > Users > (Your Account) > .gimp-(version number) > palettes. Unfortunately this is a .gpl file, and you cant just change the extension and hope it works out. I found a palette conversion program on this forum
https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=303594
It works by clicking and dragging your palette file onto it, telling it what youre converting from, then what youre converting to, then it will do the rest. Now finally! You can load the palette into the STI edit program.

If there is any wierdness with the STI edit, Ive found that you can use the button under the palette to swap foreground and background colors, then re-paste your images and that can fix it, or if for example your blue isnt the proper blue, you can double click to edit it in the STI edit program and possibly troubleshoot from there without having to edit the palettes in GIMP.

Guide author you are totally ok to just copy this wholesale into the guide if youd like, for anyone else who has GIMP and would rather brute force to make things work, I hope this helped! Personally disk space is at a premium for me, and Adobes software is generally bloated to heck for what simple uses I have in mind.

Also from user axmuris:
For GIMP users, before exporting your image as a .TGA files, you have to make sure that the alpha channel of the layer is turned off (right click on the layer -> turn off alpha channel)


Here is another comment by Cyran:
So, since I struggled so hard with this yesterday, I'll go ahead and post what I've learned.

Download Gimp if you don't have photoshop. Irfanview didn't cut it.

Make the Large, Medium and Small icons, then all the M1-9 as he suggested.

Then open up say... DwarfMF profile in the portraiteditor and export. Those files will be in portrait.

Open up Gimp and open up the DwarfMF Large/small and then copy/paste your large/small over that and then export as TGA. Simply saying as TGA doesn't do it, there's some weird settings and pallet issues so as long as you save it over a TGA that's extracted from Wizardry itself it will work.

Then do DwarfMF_M and then copy over your image onto it in gimp. Export as TGA. Then put all your M1-9 over that DwarfMF_M and export them.

These all should work.

[Cyran]

Thanks Rabcor. I had a typo when I put saying instead of Saving and I don't know why it did that

Further, I tried saving as TGA from clipstudio, I even tried opening the TGA from the wizardry portrait file in clip studio just like irfanview lacks some sort of setting so it is incapable of saving it while retaining the same pallet settings that Gimp/photoshop can which makes it unusable. there may be other programs that work, but clip/irfan do not. So I basically just did my animation edits in clip and then converted using Gimp if that makes any more sense.

only thing I noticed is 2 of the profiles are backwards when loading into the game, (the bottom right 2) but it's not a huge issue unless you're doing 'side viewing characters'. Might be because I'm using White Wolf Mod.

[Rabcor]

Thanks for your input, I added it to the guide. I'm gonna have to try following my own guide with GIMP one of these days so I can fix up the gimp section.

[Cyran]

So, since I struggled so hard with this yesterday, I'll go ahead and post what I've learned.

Download Gimp if you don't have photoshop. Irfanview didn't cut it.

Make the Large, Medium and Small icons, then all the M1-9 as he suggested.

Then open up say... DwarfMF profile in the portraiteditor and export. Those files will be in portrait.

Open up Gimp and open up the DwarfMF Large/small and then copy/paste your large/small over that and then export as TGA. Simply saying as TGA doesn't do it, there's some weird settings and pallet issues so as long as you save it over a TGA that's extracted from Wizardry itself it will work.

Then do DwarfMF_M and then copy over your image onto it in gimp. Export as TGA. Then put all your M1-9 over that DwarfMF_M and export them.

These all should work.

[Rabcor]

Yes.

[Barbed wire]

Resolution, so size of the image?

[Rabcor]

Sounds like resolution mismatch, you need to make sure the edited images are the exact same resolution as the originals. Animations looking weird might be related to this as well.

[Barbed wire]

I ran into an issue and I'm unsure how to fix it. My portrait looks weirdly stretched despite using the correct image format. And the animations seem all over the place if that makes sense. Any fix?

[Buppy]

I found a solution. The GRV program from https://storage.rcs-rds.ro/links/4729f8d6-f44b-42b7-aa3e-e0ddc6deead6?path=%2FJA_2%2FModding_Tools works to modify the large and small STI files directly. I assume it would also work for the medium, but those were already working for me so I didn't test it.

[Buppy]

I can't get the large or small portraits to work in game. They show up fine in the portrait editor, but it's like the game is ignoring the GFX files and just showing the default portraits. Same issue using the sample files from the download. I can edit the GrayTiefing sti files and those work in game, but I also want to change the RPC portraits. I can get the medium files to work in game just fine. Is there a setting somewhere or an ini file you need to make the GFX files show in game?

[Rabcor]

Copying? Did you try just opening the file normally? (Click the yellow folder icon near the top left, navigate to the file and open it)