Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Mods How do I: add portraits and heads/head textures?

I would imagine this is a simple request, but since I'm not familiar with this toolkit, I'm going to ask to save time. How do I add new character portraits, add new character heads (face textures)?

I don't think a portrait is actually added, it could be a derivative of the head model, like dragon age?

All the portraits are in a single image file and the individual portraits are references to that atlas.

It makes adding portraits incredibly obnoxious, especially if multiple modders want to do it.

Maybe another such atlas file can be made? Ive started taking screenshots of various character faces combinations and cropping them down to approximate portrait size anyway. Just seeing them in a folder somewhere made me feel better.

If anyone figures out how to enable another such file, people could maybe add their own screenshots to it... so those who would go for this option of in game screeeshot portraits could have this option working.

Well I've got some bad news: in the game's current state there is no way to overwrite the default textures and meshes using a mod.

The portraits file counts a texture and like the rest cannot be overwritten with a modded version: the game will just gleefully ignore the version used in your mod and continue using the default portrait set found in Textures.pak.

The only thing I could get to work was manually unpacking the Textures.pak files into the public/main/assests folder, deleting Textures.pak, then altering the the extracted files. Of course this means altering the main game, deleting a major file, and is just genuinely messy. I would not recommend trying this but if you do make sure to backup everything you change.

So sadly at the moment there is no practical way to add new portraits to the game, or even overwrite existing ones.

Thanks for letting me know. I figured texture replacement would be one of the first features of the toolset. Oh well, maybe they'll add it later.

There is a way to load different portraits for existing NPCs without having to modify files in the Main module, however this is still a hacky solution.
What you need:

A texture atlas
This contains the new portrait images; this must be a DXT5 compressed DDS file.
Each icon should be 64x64. It doesn't matter how many icons it contains (it may only be one, may be more), just make sure that the image size is a multiple of 64.
The file goes to Public\Main\Assets\Textures\Icons.

A texture atlas descriptor
This contains metadata about our portraits, including the names and UV coords of the icons in the texture.
These files are in Data\Public\Main\GUI.
I haven't found a way to make these work from a separate mod, they only replace the icons if they're in the Main module.
The game loads texture atlases in lexicographical order (eg. the zzz.lsb atlas will load after portraits.lsb, so it can overwrite items in portraits.lsb).

A resource package
This contains a list of resources (textures, phys assets, materials, ...) that the game can use.
We need this to assign an UUID to the texture; without an ID, the texture cannot be referenced from the texture atlas files!

Working example: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32263228/dos/PortraitOverrides.zip (replaces Arhu's portrait while in cat form)
"Mod" .pak: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32263228/dos/PortraitOverrides.pak

Edit: If you're adding new portraits and not replacing existing ones, you don't need to modify the Main mod at all, adding those to your mod folder should work.