My collection of PC Portraits

[NineShadowEyes]

I made some portraits for my campaign. Thought I'd share. They kinda focus on the race/class/sex combos in my campaign (a gnome wizard, for one) so it's not very 'complete'.

portraits.zip - 306KB (www.nineshadoweyes.com/downloads/Portraits.zip)

[Hamish]

Thanks for that. I like 'em!

[Thygrrr]

Cool, what medium did you draw the originals on, if I may ask? :)

[GeneralChaos]

Whoa. Those are pretty sweet.
I've tried my hand at making portraits, but I make them significantly larger than required, then shrink them down - the result takes a while and doesn't always end up looking so good.
Just wondering how you go about it?

[NineShadowEyes]

Cool, what medium did you draw the originals on, if I may ask? :)

Lol! I didn't draw those. I got them from all over the internet, but particularly Wizard's D&D art gallery.

[NineShadowEyes]

Just wondering how you go about it?

First, I looked at the default portraits to see what format they're in. 24-bit PNG, 63x63 pixels, at 96 dpi. The FG guys say dpi has no bearing on the images, but the originals were 96 dpi so I did mine that way too.

Basically, I crop an image to a square around the characters face/head. One thing that becomes pretty apparent right away is that it doesn't really matter what the image is of... only the face is important. So just concentrate on the face.

I'll measure the face to see how many pixels tall it is. If the image is looking at the character pretty much straight on I measure from chin to top of forehead. If the image is looking at the character from slightly above so that you can see the top of their head, then I measure from chin to midway between the top of the forehead and the highest (most vertical on the image) portion of their head. If they have a cloak or helm or whatever blocking things I just guesstimate. The character's face measurement should be about 65% of the image hieght. So I take the face measurement and divide by 0.65 and that gives me the size of the square I need to crop. I tend to center the square horizontally between the character's eyes, but vertically I center the head a bit above the midline. This makes room the PC name that appears on the portrait image in FG. It just takes a few tries to get a rough feel for it.

Once I crop and have a square image of the face I increase the brightness and contrast. You have to exaggerate this quite a bit, make it almost cartoony, so that it still looks good when you resize to 63 pixels. I use Fireworks MX 2004 and set the Brightness to 9 and Contrast to 13 for almost all of these.

When I resize I make sure it's set to 96 dpi, but, again, the FG guys say this isn't necessary. After the resize I apply a sharpen filter and see if it looks better. Usually, it does, but not always.

Then I export as 24-bit PNG and drop into the portraits folder.

[Griogre]

When I resize I make sure it's set to 96 dpi, but, again, the FG guys say this isn't necessary.
I don't think it is if you use top down tokens. However if you are like me and use portrait tokens from PC tokens then a higher DPI like 96 may matter when you zoom in on the token so it ends up larger. I also think I get better results in the art program if I am in a higher resolution when I sharpen the picture after a resize.

That was a good tip on changing the contrast and brightness *before* resizing. I've also found the "relief" special effect to be useful sometimes as a sharpener. Sometimes, though, even if I like a pic alot I just can't get it to look good in 63x63 without more work than it is worth. I found it just better to move on - there are tons of pics out there on the Internet.

[Tailz Silver Paws]

Heh, neat set of portaits. I make portaits for my token packs, but I find most people hunt around the web for a photo or some other picture to hack up into their portait.

[heruca]

Off-topic: Tailz, I'm using one of your portraits (slightly edited/customized) in a game that's about to start.

https://hdrpg.com/drupal/files/u29/Ricardo_Montenegro_Portrait.jpg

I love that it matches the top-down token perfectly.

[Tailz Silver Paws]

Off-topic: Tailz, I'm using one of your portraits (slightly edited/customized) in a game that's about to start.

https://hdrpg.com/drupal/files/u29/Ricardo_Montenegro_Portrait.jpg

I love that it matches the top-down token perfectly.
Hahahaaa, thats neat!! :D