3. Tutorial: How to Create, Import to NWN, and Publish Your Characters' Portraits.

Tutorial: How to Create, Import to NWN, and Publish Your Characters' Portraits.


  • Doing this requires 4 steps:

    1. Create Character Art,
    2. Convert Character's Art into NWN Portrait Files,
    3. Import NWN Portrait Files into NWN's Portraits Directory,
    4. Publish portraits in the internet.

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    1. Create Character Art,

    If You are Artist, then You know what to do.
    Otherwise, You can take an IG screenshot and use Artificial Intelligence tools such as ChatGPT or DeviantArt's DreamUp AI to increase image's quality and transform it in other ways.

    After uploading initial image, use commands such as:

    • Please improve image's quality,
    • Please turn her hair white,
    • Change the background to autumn forest,
    • Please make the image more artsy,
      ... or whatever comes to Your mind.
    1. Convert Character's Art into NWN Portrait Files,

    A single portrait consists of five (uncompressed, 24-bit) .tga files, implementing the different image sizes used by the game. Each size includes an unused region at the bottom, which is required but never shown by the game. (Some portrait makers store image credits in this bottom portion.) The five sizes are:

    • huge (256x512 canvas; upper 256x400 used), seen during character creation;
    • large (128x256 canvas; upper 128x200 used), seen on character sheets;
    • medium (64x128 canvas; upper 64x100 used);
    • small (32x64 canvas; upper 32x50 used), seen in the party bar, excluding the player's own character, and in radial menus;
    • tiny (16x32 canvas, upper 16x25 used), seen in the mouse-over name bubbles and chat window.

    Each of these sizes can be identified by the last letter ('H', 'L', 'M', 'S', or 'T') of the file name before the ".tga" extension.

    ... so, create five files resized appropriately, and name them correctly - and You are done! 🙂

    ( in Chea's case, i had five files named: cheaH.tga, cheaL.tga, cheaM.tga, cheaS.tga and cheaT.tga, appropriately resized ).

    1. Import NWN Portrait Files into NWN's Portraits Directory,

    If you have narfell portraits from steam workshop installed, then copy portrait files into a folder:
    C:\ -> Program Files (x86) -> Steam -> steamapps -> workshop -> content -> 704450 -> 1390527926 -> portraits

    Or, if You do not have portraits from steam workshop installed, the folder is:
    C:\ -> Users -> [your username] -> Documents -> Neverwinter Nights -> portraits

    (on Windows 11, other operating systems might differ).

    1. Publish portraits in the internet.

    (This will allow others to see Your characters' portraits while in game).

    Easiest way is to upload zipped portraits to a cloud service such as (Google's Drive).

    Then, select the uploaded file, and click three dots to the right, then click Share -> Share. Choose: 'Anyone who has the link', then click: 'copy link'.

    Go to the: 'Character Portrait Files' thread in the Narfell's Forums, create a post in which You can put links to your character portraits' zipped files, taken from Google Drive or other hosting service.

    Good Luck! 🙂

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    P.S. There's a NWN tool called NWN Explorer that makes it easy to see character portrait's file name, extracting it from character's .bic file in one's nwn localvault directory. No need to check every portrait in the folder to see how original portrait was named. 🙂
    P.S.S. If you have troubles/questions, feel free to contact me (Attentus) on Narfell's Discord chat. Might take me a while to answer, as sometimes I am busy with work other things, though.