I wanted some answers as to how some modders can create new graphic animations of self-made BroodWar Unit Portraits? I have yet as to figure out how, even looking through a lot of StarCraft's previous modding posts and nothing. Do you guys know the requirements to making a new StarCraft unit portrait if there was a way with modding? I'm still a beginner and don't have any knowledge as to how to modify such type of graphics.

Disclaimer: I've never touched portraits.

First you need an MPQ editor (I use Ladik's MPQ Editor) to extract the portraits/place the portraits from/in the game files. Then you need to find programs that can edit (or create) SMK files, recommend searching for something like "Brood War Portrait File" or "Brood War SMK"; top google result.

Hope someone can help more!

I don't know if GIMP natively supports SMK (I doubt it), but I'm pretty sure there's a way you can make it open those files. Then you just have to make new/modify images for each frame so that the animation looks smooth. I highly recommend only modifying Blizzard's portraits and not trying to make new ones altogether because the new ones always look awful compared to the original ones.

this will allow you to convert SMKs to and from bitmaps.

It's hard to find on google, since Rad Game Tools took it off their website.

So basically it is better to just switch around a portrait from an existing unit than it is to try and make a new one from the ground up, is that right?

Render the animation out of 3ds max and then convert it to bmps to compile. I don't know if there is frame count limits, but I assume there to be.

Thanks for the info and by the way...

IskatuMesk, I am not trying to be mean, but your signature, I assume it is, after reading it just made me cringe... Is that the intention of your sig?

Yes. It is specifically intended to make you, and you alone, cringe. It's payback for your CC posts. You're very mean. Very very very mean.

/e I updated it so the cringe should be more subtle albeit sinister. It will strike you when you least expect it, like when you're in the middle of a spa surrounded by bears.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 18 2016, 1:16 am by IskatuMesk.

"Payback for my Campaign Creations posts!?" What the fuck did I do to you?

Right now, I am trying my best to figure out how people animate and mod unit portraits, like you guys did for Legacy of the Confederation.

You stole my goat. I will never forgive you for laying your hands on Betty. This is war. Psychological war. In the mud.

3ds max or manually editing the frames in photoshop and then compiling with old rad tools are your only bet. Make note that just like grps portraits have special palettes and the bmps must be a very specific format which I don't remember.

Do they really have palletes? I thought it was just a matter of making them 256 color bitmap rle uncompressed.
Might have to test how to make portraits sometime this week.

They do have palettes. I can't recall if it's the unit palette or something different (iirc it was something different but I mean that was like 7 years ago now).

Just using generic 256 color gets you a similar situation as you do changing the palette for menu backgrounds and not the other elements.

I think, anyways. I mean, it was long ago that something else could have influenced that research. But I don't remember what other factors there may have been.

What if this process for making unit portraits have to be done in Windows 7? This could present a possible problem, considering older games have a clash with how Windows 7 deals with colors in the 256 palette range.

If you don't have a Windows XP VM or computer, you cannot make portraits.

It shouldn't matter as long as you have software that can properly edit the images. I don't believe that WinXP is required.

The portrait bitmaps I have just use the generic unit palette. (It's also been a long time for me. xD)

EDIT:
Just to test, I compiled this smk on my windows 7 machine. Seems to work fine.
And it works in SC just fine


EDIT2:
Now that I think about it, there was an option to use a palette based on another image (instead of generating it or using the native palette). That might be an option, too.

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Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Dec 21 2016, 3:01 am by FaRTy1billion.