Instant Portraits - Annoying??

[WindyGamer]

Anybody else annoyed by the Instant Portrait function? It requires an edit every time you change your gear in any way? For each Job? How about it just auto-clicks edit and Save, so you get face camera / sparkles and the correct border without doing that each time you change a ring or something? How about that?

With 15 jobs, isn't it a bit much to have this thing needing edits all the time?

Whatever

[Fawkes]

Adventurer plates and the beta for portraits prove that they could do portraits correctly but just choose not to.

Having them be tied to gearsets and needlessly making it so your gear has to match but the portrait doesn't auto update with the gearsets (or just keep working) so you have to go in a whole different menu and find that gearset's portrait to update it manually which makes it easy to forget and you only find out there's a problem after you queue into something and see that's it's broken but you can't fix it in a duty so you have to do the whole duty before you can fix it and it only shows you yours at the start and not the end so it's easy to forget again that it's broken and queue for something else without fixing it again and most people eventually just give up on it because it's such a player-unfriendly system with too many rules for something so minor and it doesn't even completely stop people from making weird portraits where their face is covered or whatever so the justification that your portrait has to look exactly like you do right at that moment so people who can't read names or understand job icons can comm the right person doesn't even hold up well so it would be nice if they'd relax the rules a bit or just make it work like an adventurer plate where you can set it and forget it.

[TheMightyMollusk]

I turned it off and ignore it. As someone who switches jobs all the time, it's too annoying to have to reset it every single time. Let me just set one picture to keep or I'm not gonna bother.

[Iscah]

I turned it off and ignore it. As someone who switches jobs all the time, it's too annoying to have to reset it every single time. Let me just set one picture to keep or I'm not gonna bother.

Switching jobs isn't what breaks it – the trigger is changing the appearance of the gear in your current gearset (or your actual character appearance) compared to the last time you saved your portrait. If you switch any gear and don't reapply the same glamours to match what is in the portrait, even if the item isn't visible in the portrait, that is what causes it to break.

Fixing it requires you to save the updated gearset, then go to "edit portrait" and save it even if you're not manually changing anything in the portrait.

Surely there is a simpler way for this to be set up? Ideally it would only break if our current class doesn't match the portrait, to prevent any weird poses from things combining strangely, but it should just reference our current appearance instead of checking against some previous saved list.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Switching jobs isn't what breaks it – the trigger is changing the appearance of the gear in your current gearset (or your actual character appearance) compared to the last time you saved your portrait. If you switch any gear and don't reapply the same glamours to match what is in the portrait, even if the item isn't visible in the portrait, that is what causes it to break.

Fixing it requires you to save the updated gearset, then go to "edit portrait" and save it even if you're not manually changing anything in the portrait.

And changing jobs changes my current gearset and its appearance. So, my post still stands.

[Iscah]

And changing jobs changes my current gearset and its appearance. So, my post still stands.

No, you're misunderstanding how things are connected up.

Each gearset has its own portrait. You could have gearset with a working portrait and another gearset with a non-working portrait, and if you switched between them and went into duties you would see that it works or doesn't work or works again accordingly.

Equip gearset X, and the system tries to load portrait X for duties. The portrait saves its own list of what you were wearing when you saved the portrait, and if your current gear doesn't match, the portrait breaks.

Switch to gearset Y, and the game now uses portrait Y. It doesn't matter whether portrait X was working or not, now it checks whether your clothing matches portrait Y.

You can't break a portrait by switching gearsets. It's all about the appearance of the equipment you're wearing right now compared to the portrait linked your current gearset – every piece of jewellery, even your invisible hat – needs to match what was saved to the portrait.

To be clear, I'm not defending the current system. It's shockingly clunky even if you understand how it works, but at least understanding it lets you get your portrait working some of the time.

[Tint]

The system is designed in a way that it works when you link a glamour plate to a gearset. Then the portrait gets automatically updated (when you switch to the gearset).

But of course then you have to go to the dresser every time you want to change your glamour. And there are more jobs than glamour plates available...

Like nobody wants to use it that way. Having portraits update your current gear automatically is what people want, without the link to the glamour plate. It should just show what you are currently wearing. And it already works like that for hairstyles. You don't have to update your portrait when you change your hair.

[Iscah]

The system is designed in a way that it works when you link a glamour plate to a gearset. Then the portrait gets automatically updated (when you switch to the gearset).

The portrait doesn't get automatically updated; the gear gets automatically updated to match the portrait because it's getting re-glamoured to match the portrait every time you equip it. And even then you could break it by changing some equipment after the glamours have been applied.

[Oizen]

I kinda just wish you could use one portrait for everything and not have to deal with it breaking because you slotted a materia on some random item