Game modification: Portrait Builder : Portrait Builder

Portrait Builder Type Tool Author(s) Measter & Romulien Status 2.5.0 for CK2 2.8.x Forum Link

Portrait Builder in action

Portrait Builder is a utility tool for Windows, allowing to create custom characters, by previewing their appearance based on their DNA and properties.

It can be used for character modding, portrait modding or save-game editing.

The tool written in C#/.NET was initially created by Measter in 2012, and when development stopped, the tool was open-sourced.

It was updated in 2016 by Romulien to make it compatible with latest vanilla patch.

Features [ edit ]

Read portraits from vanilla, DLC zip archives, or mods

Preview character portraits based on portraitTypes (ethnicity, sex, age, year), dna, properties, rank and government. Merchant republic and religious special clothing frames are supported via a government drop-down. Societies clothing override is supported via an optional dropdown to replace sprites used by culture-indexed layers (c0->c7)

Auto-watch for modifications on loaded mod files while editing, to automatically reload the mod data and refresh current portrait

Randomize values for selected characteristics

Save current character portrait as png image

Import/export DNA and properties strings

Disable the characteristics that are not used by selected portrait type, or that have only one frame.

Read the user mod folder location via a userdir.txt file in Steam directory (if any)

Things which are not currently supported include:

Linux/Mac platforms (cross-compilation with Mono is not working due to dds image library)

Load order change via dependencies in .mod file : load order is vanilla -> DLCs (alphabetical) -> mods (alphabetical)

in .mod file : load order is vanilla -> DLCs (alphabetical) -> mods (alphabetical) Dynamic government parsing (it uses hardcoded vanilla governments)

Installation [ edit ]

Download the latest version of the tool from the dedicated CK2 forum thread and unzip it somewhere.

Install .NET 4.5, if not already present.

Start PortraitBuilder.exe

Select the location of your CK2game.exe (for instance: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Crusader Kings II\CK2game.exe ). Note: you can get the location from Steam, by right-clicking the game in the library, then Properties / Local Files / Browse Local Files

). Note: you can get the location from Steam, by right-clicking the game in the library, then Properties / Local Files / Browse Local Files Wait 20-30s for the DLCs to unzip, then the UI should show up

Troubleshooting [ edit ]

In case of issue:

Check the log.txt file next to PortraitBuilder.exe: it will report crash exceptions, parsing errors of portrait data, corrupted assets, etc.

Adding -logfull to PortraitBuilder.exe launch options will set log level to DEBUG.



