Portrait Guide

In this guide, I'll describe how we add portraits. Before you start, to learn basic things, read the Portrait Modding Article. I recommend you to read only the Custom ethnicities paragraph, but you can read more if you want.

Also, it will be nice to install the Portrait Builder to see your WIP portraits in real-time.

Preparations

First, let's install the Model Viewer, a program that allows exporting WoW models. Open Warcraft-Guardians-of-Azeroth\.artist_resources\portraits, create two folders: <race name>_male and <race name>_female. If your race has only one gender or both look the same create only one folder: <race name>. In these folders, you're going to store your "assets" and information about your race.

Also, before you start, read these guidelines and keep them in mind:

1. TRY TO compare the distance between the eyes and their position of your portrait to the vanilla portrait. One vanilla exemplar is located in Warcraft-Guardians-of-Azeroth\.artist_resources\portraits, the file is western_male_base_1.tga. It's done to make sure your portrait isn't too close/far and positioned right.
2. We RECOMMEND use 800 x 600 canvas size. It's can be set in View > Set Canvas Size.

Setting and saving positions in Model Viewer

Now let's open the Model Viewer and find the model we want. Before you start cutting images, I'll try to explain why we need position.txt and light.txt located in every folder of Warcraft-Guardians-of-Azeroth\.artist_resources\portraits. These files contain model coordinates and angles for use in the WoW Model Viewer. We have these files so we can place models in the same position many times. ALWAYS CREATE THESE FILES WHEN YOU ADD PORTRAITS FOR A NEW RACE! And store these files in the folders you recently created.

First thing, NEVER ROTATE THE CAMERA! This will make the coordinates and angles useless. If you did it accidentally, just reload the model by switching to another model and back.

position.txt

The first three numbers from position.txt are model coordinates that can be used in View > Show model control > Position, X, Y, Z respectively. The last three numbers are rotation angles, they can be used in the same place, they're rX, rY, rZ respectively. We recommend turning your portrait model -65 degrees (I mean left-right, ignore up-down direction). This is the most common rotation angle we use.

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light.txt

The first three numbers from light.txt are light source coordinates that can be used in View > Show light control > Position XYZ, X, Y, Z respectively. DON'T FORGET TO CHECK OFF Relative! Otherwise, the light source won't work. The last number from light.txt is a brightness of Ambience color. Ambience COLOR MUST BE COLORLESS! To set the brightness, click on the color and select the right brightness. We recommend using gray Ambience with brightness set to 70. The light source should be on your left approximately at the level of the model’s head or higher.

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Saving screenshots

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After you get the right angle and lighting, let's get rid of hairs and clothes. Open **View ** > Show model control and take a look at Geosets. Find here everything you don't want to see on a clear model: usually, it's hairs, clothes, etc. because they go to another layer.

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Now, the model is ready for screenshots. Click File > Save Screenshot. If you want to cut features, be ready to make a few screenshots. Let's save these screenshots in the folders we created in Warcraft-Guardians-of-Azeroth\.artist_resources\portraits.