Character Portraits

[Orcini]

I followed the directions and placed the downloaded a few portraits and put them in the portraits folder in the root of the FG folder. The players see only the standard 8 4 fem and 4 male. I also copied them into the campaign portraits in case i screwed it up.

Still no joy.

What am i doing wrong?

[Griogre]

Portraits are one of the few pieces of data that come from the client computers. Your players need to download the portraits and put them in their portrait folder.

[Netjera]

Portraits are one of the few pieces of data that come from the client computers. Your players need to download the portraits and put them in their portrait folder.

Is this permissible with purchased packs? I purchased the portraits pack from here, so my players could use them. Can I copy the portraits to them, or do they need to purchase another copy?

[Leonal]

Is this permissible with purchased packs? I purchased the portraits pack from here, so my players could use them. Can I copy the portraits to them, or do they need to purchase another copy?

A gray area I suppose. One solution is for you to assign the portrait through a second client to the player's character.

I would say the portrait packs are more of a player's resource though.

[Netjera]

Ah I didn't know that. I bought a set that was combined tokens and portraits. I had no idea that the portraits are player only and the tokens are DM only, and I figured that it wouldn't matter, because I'd be able to share things appropriately.

I hate to say it, but that's a really stupid way to package stuff then. I can only use half of what paid for, and can't share the other half with the people who can. >.< They really should be separate packs, so folks know what they're getting, and clearly marked: "These are Portraits, for player use." "These are Tokens, for GM use."

Another minor complaint - It would be nice if there was a sample list of what's included in the pack, or a couple of images. I took a risk buying the first package, since there are no returns. If this company didn't have such a great community, I doubt I would've risked doing-so. Buy something I can't see, which has no details, from a company that has a "no return" policy? I don't think so. A list of the categories included in the product, and a shot or two of the art would be highly appropriate. The art is great. I bet many more people would buy, if they knew what they were really getting.

Thanks for the tip about releasing the characters, then using a local connection to apply the portraits. It doesn't give the players the same flexibility I wanted, but at least their characters have nice portraits now.

[Leonal]

Actually you don't even have to release them, if you just log in with the same ID that your player's use. Though of course if you're assigning for multiple characters it's probably easier to release them.

I do agree that there should be a way to share portraits, just like one can with tokens though. And more info about the individual product is always good.

[Netjera]

Actually you don't even have to release them, if you just log in with the same ID that your player's use. Though of course if you're assigning for multiple characters it's probably easier to release them.

I do agree that there should be a way to share portraits, just like one can with tokens though. And more info about the individual product is always good.

Yeah, I shared all the non-monster related tokens with the PCs, although, now I'm wondering what the use is. They can't really use them. It would be awesome to be able to drop portraits into a shared portraits folder. Problem solved. :D

[gmkieran]

Just a thought on the possible logic behind combining token and portrait packs. One player isn't always, hopefully, going to be the DM and is going to want portraits for a character they're playing at some point. Buying both together means you can be either DM or player and have the resources you need. Sure, it would be nice if one person could buy the images and several people use them, but that's not a profitable business model, now is it? I don't know that that's the logic, since I don't work for Smiteworks, but that's one possibility.

Of course, I didn't buy any of the packs in the FG store, partly because I couldn't see what was in them. Instead I trolled google for images people had placed in the public domain that I liked for portrait art and downloaded those; it took a little fiddling to re-size them, but I have unique portrait art and a large selection. There are some good free resources for tokens, too, if you look hard enough. Some of them are even linked on the Downloads page at FG, iirc.

Cheers!

[Valarian]

You can assign portraits to characters outside FG2 on the GM's PC, but it's a little bit of a faf. In the campaign folder, create/open the portraits folder. Copy the PNG pictures you want to assign to the characters. Rename the files to reflect the ID number of the character in the db.xml file, without the .png extension. E.g. id-0001

When you start FG2 you should see the portraits in the character list. I've used this method to assign portraits to characters for demo games. It is a little tricky though, so the method of starting a client session on a localhost connection to assign portraits is sometimes better. It just takes longer that way. Don't forget, if you use that method, to clear the owner of the characters in the character list before play, or your players won't be able to see their character when they log in.