In-Game Portrait

[Nurvus]

I think it would be awesome if the Portrait in-game was 2D-style.
Pretty much like the concept art and the wallpapers.

If the options to customize your character are like WoW (fixed options) then the portrait could be a simple overlap of images (corresponding to the eyes, mouth, hair, etc, and their colors) that are identical to the 3D render.

If the options to customize your character are like Age of Conan (alot of available changes) then maybe a 2D style treatment could be applied to the 3D render to turn it into a portrait.
.....

Why? Usually 3D portraits in all games are ugly, to say the least...

[Rauko]

Portrait? You mean for the login screen or equipment screen?
If you mean for the login screen then I suppose thats fine.

But for the Equipment screen...
Sorry, but I definitely like being able to spin my player 360 to see what things look like on me. I could do it by moving the window aside and spinning the main camera around my character, but theres a number of reasons why that can be annoying.

Additionally, this can be easily imported into a "Try-on" window. Where you can try on different items from a store and it pops up in a 3D, rotating image of what your character would look like with that item equipped.
Can't use the option I offered above in that situation since you don't actually have it equipped.

Not sure about WoW, but all this really is is a smaller version of what you see of yourself in the game. Just shrunk into a window and independently manipulated.
If it looks bad, then that probably means your character looks bad.
So fix the character so it looks ok and that will fix the portrait :P

[Nurvus]

I mean UI portrait.
And no, the fact that they are smaller versions in WoW doesn't necessarily relate to the beauty of the character herself due to Lighting, etc.

Ofcourse I wouldn't be speaking of changing Functions to work badly.. like equipment screen not showing what it should...

[jimmy6154]

Is this like the picture of your face and/or body that some games have next to your status bars?

either way, I think that would be cool.

[Rauko]

yea..sorry if I'm being dense :/

Calling it a User Interface portrait still isn't giving me a solid idea of what exactly you mean?

I can only think of what jimmy said.

LotRO has those, and yea, they can be ugly, but if go to lower settings it just replaces it with an Icon of their class. Not sure, but there might be a specific option for it.

Might be a good option to give to make them solid 2D renders of their face, or moving 3D, or just icon of their class.

[reddo]

I don't pay attention to the picture much. It could be a cube with a smile for all I care. But if I were to think about the picture, I'd like it to change depending on what equipment I've got.

[MESS14H]

You could still make it 2D and capture whatever kit / headgear your wearing at the time as all that would be needed is some form of code that takes a snapshot of your 3d render to get a 2d image each time you change an item/ alter visual appearance etc.
This shouldn't be to difficult to code surely.
Having a standard set of portrait 2D overlays wouldn't make them very unique even if Demon managed to spend the Dev time to create an abundance of them. Allowing players to upload their own is usually a big no no as the ability of uploading personal content has often been a nice back door to upload embedded software to do all other kinds of malicious things with the game code and the game server.
As for an equipment view aka paper doll or Toon, This would probably be best rendered in 3D as it gives the player a 3D perspective of your Toon
P.S. I think the correct term for player pic is " Unit Frame portrait "
Unit as in Unit or, Entity that the player selects and is currently active in the game world.

[Elite001]

I Don't think it's necessary to have an ingame-portait, just causes more FPS and lag, also makes more work for developers.. i think they should start with this within beta-development status.