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| Thread: Create Your Own Hero Portraits HOMM3 | |
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zombiewhacker
Adventuring Hero
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posted December 24, 2021 10:38 AM |
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Create Your Own Hero Portraits HOMM3
This has been asked and answered before, but I couldn't find the original thread. What do you need to add your own custom hero portraits? I'm using unmodded HOMM3 complete, GOG version.
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Bytebandit
Promising
Famous Hero
Soul Merchant
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posted December 28, 2021 06:16 AM |
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I used Adobe Photoshop to convert jpeg or bmp files into pcx files. The very files HoMM3 requires for it's portraits.
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Baronus
Legendary Hero
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posted December 28, 2021 08:49 AM |
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H3 layers are little complicated.
Best irfanview.
Create big and small face bmp or png.
Jpg is wrong because its lose quality compresion.
Add big blue frame.
Reduce pallette to 256 colors.
Check pallete. Blue must be first color its transparency.
Autocrop (blue) borders option.
Save as bmp and inject to lod file using MMarchive or save as pcx and place in data folder.
This way you can replace all bitmap in H3 excluding player color btmps its more complicated.
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BTB
Famous Hero
Moist & Creamy
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posted January 10, 2022 01:39 PM |
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I covered this in my hacking guide:
When editing hero specialties, you will also need to edit HeroSpec.txt from the H3bitmap.lod archive as
well as the icons stored in UN32.def and UN44.def, both located in H3sprite.lod. The .def archives are
collections of images along with an index which lists the order in which they are called. In this case,
the order of the images in UN(XX).def is the hero index - the same order as they appear in HeroSpec.txt.
If a new specialty is added, such as 7th-level creature bonuses, then you'll need to create new images.
To do this, extract the .def archive for the creature in question from H3sprite.lod, select the desired
animation frame (usually the first one) as a base, resize it to 44x44, remove the transparency layer by
deleting all of the cyan pixels, then paste it onto the "blank" template image found in SecSkill.def.
For the UN32 icon, either resize the 44x44 icon or use the small creature portrait from CrSmall.def.
When doing this, be sure that the resulting image is still 256 colors - I prefer to promote images to 16
million colors before resizing them for better quality and then reduce the depth back to 256 afterward.
However, the first color in the palette index - generally the darkest color in the image - is set as the
transparent color in-game. So set this color to something bright/noticeable like hot pink and paint over
any instances of it in your image (usually just a pixel or two) with the closest color you have to it.
Note that the above information is applicable to any kind of graphics editing, such as creating your own
hero portraits. Feel free to edit any images you find, simply bearing in mind that they must be reduced
to 256-color bitmaps and the first color will always be treated as a transparency layer.
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gnollking
Supreme Hero
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posted January 10, 2022 05:05 PM |
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The hero portraits actually have 10 (12 in new HotA portraits) "reserved" colors, the first 10 in the 256 color palette. First one should be transparency color like others have mentioned (generally cyan 00ffff). This is not a rule, but when I make my own portraits I use complete black for the second color, which you should have anyways and use for the black outline in the small portrait. I have yet to find any reason at all why the original portraits have those other reserved colors, using them as you wish has not shown any difference in game. The 2 extra colors that all HotA portraits have are full black and white, for some reason.
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