How to edit/import your own portraits for FE: Fates

I’ve had a lot of people ask me some similar questions, so I though I’d make a visual guide of what I do and go through each step in making/importing portraits into Fates, this is a very image heavy guide!

So first you want to download a few set of tools.

The file format goes as follows, image > TGA > CTEX > BCH > BCH.LZ





For the tga format, you can use any image editor of your choosing, I use paint.net as it gets the job done.

For ctex and bch, these set of tools provided by @unassumingvenusaur​ will get the job done.

You will also need a program to handle lz11 compression, I use puyo tools as it does the job wonderfully.

So with that in mind, first off, we need an image to edit, for this example, I’ll be handling Asugi’s Heirs of Fates cutin portrait.

In this instance, I’ll just recolor his eye brows so they match his hair color, once done, hit save as, and save the image as a tga with tmp as the filename;

Next, from the downloaded tools, go to the TextureConverter folder, hold down shift, right click on the folder, and hit “Open Command Window here”

Once the command prompt windows opens up, take your tmp.tga file, drag it inside the TextureConverter folder, and open the folder.

take note of the cmd.txt file, open it up, highlight everything (or press ctrl+a), and hit copy.

Now go to your command prompt window, and right click on it to paste what we just copied, then hit enter to start the tga to ctex convertion process.

once this is done, you will now have a tmp.ctex file

Copy this file, go back out of the TextureConverter folder, and now into the bin folder;

drag your tmp.ctex file into NW4C_h3dbincvtr.exe and it will now give you a tmp.bch file, we’re almost done!

now we need to compress the file using lz11 compression, so for this, I use puyo tools.

find your tmp.bch file…

and compress it using lz11 compression

now hit compress, a “compressed” folder will be created with the compressed file inside, still not finished!

Go into the compressed folder, and drag your file into a hex editor, i use HxD for this, it’ll look something like this;

Highlight the first 4 bytes, or first 4 pairs of 2 numbers/letters

now copy them, move your cursor to the very start of the file, and paste them again, the numbers would now repeat themselves, like so;

Now, the very first number, yours should ALWAYS be an 11, change it from 11 to 13;

now hit save, then we must rename our file to add the .lz extension to it.

At this point, you should verify that your bch.lz file is working as intended, open up FEAT (Fire Emblem Archive Tool), and drag your newly made tmp.bch.lz file into it, if you have done everything correctly, it should create a tmp_ folder with your edited portrait inside it.

Now that we have confirmed that our file is fully functional, we can rename it to match the portrait we are replacing, since I’m replacing a cutin portrait,

ベース.bch.lz is the name I need;

now, we copy this file, and we go to the bin folder from when we made the ctex to bch convertion earlier, and paste it there.

In this case, cutin portraits are the standalone in their own arc files, so I just need to figure out whose portrait I want to replace, and I already know it to be Asugi, so depending on the type of portrait, I name the new folder for the .arc I need to make.

the name goes (charactername)_(bu/st/ct)

_bu is the face close up portraits, like the ones used in the lower screen during battle forecast, _st standard character portraits, and _ct are the critical/cutin portraits.

As for finding out the character’s portrait names, well, you’re on your own there ;) , but here’s a hint, it’s their Japanese name, written in Japanese, you can easily get it from the wiki.

So, with this knowledge, for Asugi, I need to make a グレイ_ct folder, and place my bch.lz file in there;

after I drag the bch.lz file into it, drag the folder itself into the “create.bat” file;

This will now give you a .arc file with the name the folder has;

Again, use FEAT to test that your file has been correctly made;

now all that’s left is to test your portraits ingame!

Here are a few examples of other successful edits;





A FEW THINGS TO NOTE,

- The arc builder tool is nowhere near a finished state, so some arc files will simply not work, Felicia and Lazlow are some examples of people whose _st or _bu portraits you simply cannot rebuild, instead of editing every portrait, try only editing one portrait at first, rebuild your file, and test the waters, but from what I’ve seen, it seems the arc tool can’t create proper .arc files after a certain amount of bch.lz files are in there, so if you’re sure you’ve done everything correctly, and it doesn’t work, then it probably won’t until the arc builder tool is finished.





(this probably has like 200 different typos, it’s 2am so I’ll just pass out and clean this up later)