The silly thing is that it requires a certain percentage of your character's face to be visible, so any kind of pose with a weapon can become invalid if the replacement weapon is big enough to cross the threshold.
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I thought about changing my characters gear when I was logged out of the game and my portrait broke. :(
I've never seen it change just because of the weapon. It seems to always just be assuming you have the biggest weapon possible and considers it blocked even though it's obviously isn't. But its just bad in general. In certain poses where you face cannot be seen and it's fine. Do you have an example that is easily available?
Just let people have their butt shots and cover their faces if they want. It's not like they really care.
I have gotten used to needing to make sure I update my portrait every time I swap a piece of gear, but sometimes this doesn't even work and I'm back at Default. Then I have to remove a piece of gear, update portrait. Then put the piece back on, and update portrait to fix it.
I wonder why we can't just freeze a portrait as whatever we were wearing at the time, or have it auto-update if it really needs to be current.
Except it doesn't. It does not check for what gear you are wearing. The only thing it seems to check as far as an acceptable portrait is position and the only reasons I've seen it give are your character is not in frame and your expression isn't in frame, and that is weirdly inconsistent.
You can be fully clothed with your butt to the camera and it's fine. You change into 2b leggings and it won't show, but you go into portraits and all you have to do is save and it works. It's perfectly fine with your butt being right there.
It's not enforcing any standard of "decency". It's just annoying people who make a slight change.
Something new I just saw with glamours and portraits: I use the same plate for all tanks (because there are not enough plates) but obviously can't use the same weapon. If I wanted to change the weapon for one tank I'd put it in the plate and the others would get a warning but it wouldn't affect to portrait. Now I Had a warrior axe in the plate and I switch to paladin and the portrait is showing the sword unglamoured though it is. But it won't save it because it doesn't match. Just look at the weapon and use what is there, it really doesn't matter if it's different. I'd rather my preferred weapon show, but More I'd rather the feature work instead it being my responsibility to figure out how to make it work.
Still say that portraits should work like the adventurer plate. It doesn't matter what your current outfit looks like, it only shows what you were wearing when you "took the picture"