How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

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NickyJ
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How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby NickyJ » Fri Jun 24, 2016 3:37 pm

This thread is to collect and combine many previous sets of instructions in how to edit portraits. Included in this thread are the necessary utilities to make those edits, and detailed videos and written instructions to explain the process. These work for both player and coach portraits.

What You Need

  • Gimp - A free, useful image editor that I use for all my editing. MS Paint WILL NOT WORK FOR PORTRAIT PROJECTS.

  • PhotoShop CS2 - Most PhotoShop programs require a subscription to use. This is supposed to be the same, but Adobe released it for download to everyone a few years ago, and it has stayed within public reach. We'll call our access to it a gray area; a very useful, helpful, much appreciated gray area. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. It's old, it's ugly, and it is not as good as a new, paid PhotoShop program. But it works. If you don't have PhotoShop already, use this.

  • NVIDIA Texture Tools for Adobe Photoshop - Your finished portraits will all be in .dds format. Only PhotoShop's .dds images are compatible with Madden. These Texture Tools are what allow PhotoShop to save in .dds format.

  • StingRay's Dat Editor Version 4 - This imports the custom portraits that you will make.

  • For Windows 10/11 users only: DirectX Software Development Kit - If you are running Windows 10, StingRay's editor will most likely not run. To fix that, download the the DirectX kit. Previous versions of Windows do not have this problem or need the kit.

  • NZA's editor 1.3 - Your most basic roster editing tool. For our purposes, it edits player portrait IDs.

Making Your Portrait

Let's start from scratch. You've installed all the tools above, and you want to make a new portrait for the game. For the sake of an example, let's make a portrait of Tom Brady. By searching through Google, GettyImages, wherever... We found this portrait:

Spoiler:
Image


Now it's time to get down to business. Download the portrait, and load it up in Gimp. (If you are a brave soul that wants to do it all in PhotoShop, I can't help you. I learned it through Gimp, so I stick to what I know. Until you experiment with PhotoShop on you're own, we'll do it my way.) In Gimp, there's a number of instructions to explain, so I shall instead use a video to narrate and show you by hand:



As mentioned in the video, always save your .dds image with these EXACT settings:

Spoiler:
Image


Importing Your Portrait

By now, you should have a .dds image of the player you want to edit. The hard work is done; now it's just a matter of putting it in the game. At this point, you'll need NZA's Editor and StingRay's Dat Editor Version 4. Here's another video, narrating what you have to do:



In case you had a hard time following along, I'll make up another example. Let's say that there is a QB named David Carr, and that currently he has a cartoon portrait. You want to give him a real photo, and you've decided that you will take a different QB, Kyle Boller, and use his portrait ID for David Carr. To do this, open your roster in NZA's editor 1.3, and find Kyle Boller. When you find him, go to the Body tab of NZA's editor, and copy his portrait ID (we'll say it's 7). After doing that, set his ID to 0 (which makes it a cartoon). Go find David Carr, and give him Boller's old portrait ID: 7. Save the roster, and load StingRay's Editor.

In StingRay's Editor, load your portrait pack: UIS_LIB_PLAYER_PORT.dat. Load the ID that you plan on using: 7. It should show Kyle Boller's portrait, which you are about to replace with David Carr's. Load Carr's .dds file, and then be sure to SAVE YOUR PORTRAIT PACK. After saving the portrait pack, you're job is done. Load up the game, and you're work is finished.

Note: If you want to make and import a coach's portrait, use the same exact process except for one step. When you edit your portrait in your image editor to crop and resize it, the resized version of the portrait must to be 96x96 pixels in size. If the size is any larger, the coaches portrait pack, UIS_LIB_COACH_PORT.dat, will show a blank portrait ingame. Only coach portraits suffer from this limitation.
Image

How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

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mee
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Re: How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby mee » Fri Jun 24, 2016 3:58 pm

Does GIMP not have the Magic Wand tool? The tool(in Photoshop CS2 and paint.net) allows you to select a continuous stretch of one color.. So you don't have to carefully crop Brady out of the gray background you can take that one click with the Magic Wand and press DELETE.
So the Giants traded Beckham....

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Re: How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby NickyJ » Fri Jun 24, 2016 4:03 pm

It does have the magic wand, and a way to edit how much it selects. Even so, because the backgrounds are sometimes similar to the player's jersey or skin color, the wand will select those as well. As far as I know, PhotoShop has the same problem. You have to pick a number high enough to select all the background, but low enough not to select more than the background.

Especially troubling are the backgrounds that have multiple color tones:

Image
Image

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Re: How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby mee » Fri Jun 24, 2016 4:05 pm

Ok. I see. By the way a Tolerance of 31 is perfect for that photo.
So the Giants traded Beckham....

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Re: How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby NickyJ » Fri Jun 24, 2016 4:09 pm

Yeah, generally I use a threshold between 35 and 55. 55 good for when everything but the background is dark, 35 is good for most others. But with teams like the Patriots and Colts, I usually have to outline them by hand. It takes a bit longer, but I've gotten to the point of being able to do 90 a day if I put my effort into it. :P
Image

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Re: How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby RevanFan » Fri Jun 24, 2016 4:52 pm

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Re: How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby BigDaddyCool » Fri Jun 24, 2016 5:55 pm

I follow pretty much the same procedure that you outlined above Nicky, only instead of Gimp I use Paint Shop Pro 9 to edit the portraits, save it in .png and then do the rest in Photoshop. I also use the version 3 of StingRay's editor. I read someplace that you couldn't go beyond a certain number with version 4, and as my All-Inclusive mod has portrait numbers in the mid 3,000's now, version 3 works better for my purposes. Although I do also have version 4 of his editor which I use to expand the portrait DAT.
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Re: How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby 1312qohelet » Fri Jun 24, 2016 8:16 pm

Great thread.
Would these steps work for creating new SOLOPLAYERS??

I came up empty-handed in my search for a soloplayer tutorial.
But, elguapo told me it was the same basic process.

True/False?

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Re: How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby elguapo » Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:22 pm

True. If you heard it from me directly then it's probably true. Only slydways would question anything I say.

Soloplayers are 512x512 portrait files.

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Re: How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

Postby 1312qohelet » Sat Jun 25, 2016 4:29 pm

elguapo wrote:True. If you heard it from me directly then it's probably true. Only slydways would question anything I say.

Soloplayers are 512x512 portrait files.

I wasn't questioning anything. I have wanted to try my hand at making some updated soloplayers for us, but I only found out-dated tutorials and corrupted videos -- possibly the result of the phishing incident??

If you confirm the steps that NickyJ has laid out here will work for this, then I will try and find out if I have the necessary skills to hook us up with some new solo-players.

I appreciate the answer...cool.


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