Custom NPC Portraits Guide

A quick guide on setting up custom portraits for your NPC followers.

It's as simple as 1 2 3

Needless to say, you'll need to find yourself some custom portraits. Now there's plenty of guides out there, so this won't be an indepth guide on how to make the portraits themselves, but rather how to get them working for NPC followers.

Basically you need 3 different portrait files saved in .bmp format. The sizes of these portraits should be small (S) (54x86), medium (M) (169x266) and large (L) (210x330).

Got the portraits you want to use? Great.

The next step will be finding your Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition Portraits folder within your Documents folder. The fastest way to do this is through Library->Documents->Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition->Portraits. (This is the same folder you'd be using for any custom portraits you'd want to use for your PC)

Once you've found the folder, it's actually as easy as renaming the files with the appropriate names. Most of the character portaits are simply the character's name, along with an S, M and L for the respective sizes. The website Chosen of Mystara has an excellent reference card for the traditional games (available at http://portraits.chosenofmystra.net/npc_portrait_change.html)

For example, if you want to change Imoen's portrait, you'll be renaming the three portrait files IMOENS (small), IMOENM (medium) and IMOENL (large).

The thing to watch out for are characters with long names. That is to say, for example Montaron. If you want to change his portrait, you'll be naming your files MONTARS, MONTARM and MONTARL for their respective sizes. Now I could include a list of these names, however instead I'll kindly ask you to use the reference chart from the Chosen of Mystara website above.

However, since the list is created for the original games - not the enhanced edition - one might notice that the lists do not contain Rasaad, Neera and Dorn. Since all of their names are fairly short, there's really nothing to it. Just name the files after the character's name, along with the size of the portait and you should be good to go.

You'll change Neera's portrait by naming the files NEERAS, NEERAM, NEERAL.
You'll change Dorn's portrait by naming the files DORNS, DORNM, DORNL.
And finally, you change Rasaad's portrait by naming it RASAADS, RASAADM, RASAADL.
(For the record, these are the SAME codes used for the BG 2 EE edition as well, the EE NPCs do not recieve the name change starting with N that the other characters do)

I leave all credit to the Chosen of Mystara website, I just used their model along with common sense to figure out the EE NPCs portrait codes.

Hopefully some of you out there find this information useful.

[Solar Beam]

Putting the portraits in Documents/Baldur's Gate…/portraits also works with the GOG version, I’ve just tried it for Jaheira

[CiceroTheFatGuineaPig]

retarded guide

[IronPlum]

Essential NPC, thank you, i've figured out that it doesn't work fof GOG version.

This may be useful to anyone like me: if you use GOG version.

1) Rename preferred images that you want to use as portraits as described above.
2) Place them into override (not portraits) folder inside the root (!!!) game folder (NOT IN "DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS").

Also you can use EE keeper to check out portraits names that game uses to any NPC you need.

=)

[Incomparable Groan]

You won't see the default NPC portraits in the folder, so that's fine. Just make sure that your images has the right name for the respective NPC and they will replace the portraits in-game though.

[IronPlum]

but there are NO other pictures in that folder except of mine PC's one!

[Vengentz]

Thanks for this post. Maybe we can use the portraits from 2 in 1, for consistency.