How to - Editing and Importing Portraits

[trey31]

I haven't found anything using Search, but could we replace the default face animated cartoon photos for players that have ID #0 ?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the Portrait ID #0 tells the game to display the default animated cartoon photo and chooses the corresponding photo based on the face #.

So what if we replace the 519 default animated cartoon photos with other photos? This solves the franchise rookie animated cartoon photos issue, right?

We could use player photos pulled from FIFA or NBA/MLB 2K or PES or Rugby Challenge 3, or actual NCAA player photos or even just stock portrait photos.

Unless this has already been done and I am just out of the loop?

[NickyJ]

I'm a little bit confused. What are the animated photos you're thinking of? I know of the default cartoon portraits, but they aren't animated.

[trey31]

I'm a little bit confused. What are the animated photos you're thinking of? I know of the default cartoon portraits, but they aren't animated.

That's what I meant. The cartoon ones.


Edit: If it can't be done I suppose I could use a single "no photo available" portrait and manually set it for all of the rookie class in franchise too.

[trey31]

I'm assuming it wouldn't work, but has anyone tried using an animated .gif as a portrait replacement? Animated gif's like Monday/Sunday/Thursday Night Football uses for player intros would be the bee's knees.

Edit: Now that I think of it, animated photos would be awesome extremely difficult even if using animated .gif's did work. Plus, where would we even get them?

But it would be cool if EA put something like this into Madden 18. Madden NFL 2030 still won't have cool stuff like this though lol

[NickyJ]

Gifs aren't possible for portraits now at the moment. Madden's portrait dats accept files of only certain types, and gifs are one of the ones excluded.

I doubt future Maddens would use animated portraits either because it would be expensive to make their own recordings, as opposed to just buying the portraits that the teams already make.

For replacing the cartoon portraits with real portraits, I suppose it could be done. First you'd have to find out which ID corresponds to which cartoon to make sure the skin color matches. We know the ingame face IDs, but the cartoons would be a little bit harder since the black, white, and medium skin colors are in mixed order.

[trey31]

Gifs aren't possible for portraits now at the moment. Madden's portrait dats accept files of only certain types, and gifs are one of the ones excluded.

I doubt future Maddens would use animated portraits either because it would be expensive to make their own recordings, as opposed to just buying the portraits that the teams already make.

For replacing the cartoon portraits with real portraits, I suppose it could be done. First you'd have to find out which ID corresponds to which cartoon to make sure the skin color matches. We know the ingame face IDs, but the cartoons would be a little bit harder since the black, white, and medium skin colors are in mixed order.

I don't think EA buys any portraits; I think they come with the NFL, NFLPA, and NFLCA exclusive rights, hence certain players (LaVar Arrington) and coaches (NE Coach) have no in-game likenesses or portraits (EA could have negotiated with those players/coaches individually but chose not to for many years). And I'm sure EA "pays" for them but they probably don't "buy" them, I can't imagine it's not included as part of the deal that comes with the exclusive likeness/affiliated rights.

I'm pretty sure the rights to use player introduction video clips from (at the very least) any of the Thursday Night Football broadcasts (and any of the NFL Network produced pre-season games) would be available to EA as part of the likeness agreement, just as the official NFLPA portraits are. But either way, whether it cost EA additional money or not, this would likely never be part of a Madden game; it would require innovation and actual work. If it doesn't include new cover photos, updated rosters, slightly different GUI menus, and removing old features just to reintroduce them as "new" features later, then EA doesn't want any part of it.

/rant over.

As far as the cartoon images, I'm going to try to do this as part of my Cyberface updates.

but the cartoons would be a little bit harder since the black, white, and medium skin colors are in mixed order.

Could you elaborate on this? Do you know where the cartoon images are located? Are they in the individual plyrface.dat files? There are 519 faces in Madden and 520 identically decompressed-sized files in that .dat. I'm pretty sure those are the face textures, but idk where the cartoon images are at. Some of the cartoons are used for more than one face ID, so I'm assuming they're somewhere else?

[trey31]

For replacing the cartoon portraits with real portraits, I suppose it could be done. First you'd have to find out which ID corresponds to which cartoon to make sure the skin color matches. We know the ingame face IDs, but the cartoons would be a little bit harder since the black, white, and medium skin colors are in mixed order.

Instead of using random portraits of random people, and since VirdeeMan and I are working on cyberfaces... I got an idea.

What if I render a 2K17 face model in Blender, then apply different textures to it and save the 2D image preview and use the CGI image preview for each cyberface as the new cartoon face?

EDIT: Or a much, much easier method is to extract the player portrait that matches the cyberface and just use it. In the case of 2K17, it is already transparent and hi-res.

[VirdeeMan]

Looks good, obviously a gif player portrait would awesome but it'd be hard to do...

[elguapo]

A more realistic cartoon portrait would be nice but you would have to account for the hair setting so the cyber portraits would have to be bald.

[NickyJ]

It does look good. Like elguapo said, you'd have to make the cartoon version bald.

For where the cartoons are stored, it's in the same portrait pack as the real ones. IDs 1886 through 2404 are the faces themselves, and 2405 through 2471 are the hair styles that get displayed on top of the cartoon. Thinking of that, that would be another challenge: Making sure each new cartoon face is the right size to be overwritten by the hair choice.

Doing a quick scan of it, it looks like they're in the same order as the face IDs table that elguapo made.