By the way, I tried following your recommendation through the object editor, but without success.
Ah, sorry. This object editor feature was new two weeks ago, and I have only tried using it in the Reforged HD mode once myself personally. Still, the time that I tried it, I was able to make it work. The secret, in my case, was that the wizard for selecting a model which pops up when we double click on that setting is itself not helpful. So, instead, for example if I want to have a Paladin with the portrait of a Sheep, then what I did was to set his
Art - Portrait Model File to
Units\Critters\Sheep\Sheep_Portrait even though this magic text string is not selected by the popup wizard if we click on Sheep.
Are you able to do something like that? You could use the popup wizard to select a model, press OK so that it writes the new value to
Art - Portrait Model File and turns pink, but then double click on
Art - Portrait Model File again, seeing the popup wizard again but now with the file path at the bottom corresponding to the unit you selected, and then you can manually edit this text string so that instead of
Units\Undead\EvilSylvanas\EvilSylvanas or whatever you see there, you basically have to add
_portrait to the end of that text, so it would become something like
Units\Undead\EvilSylvanas\EvilSylvanas_portrait.mdl. Does that work?
Edit: If this new Reforged 2.0 feature does not work, then the other solution for shoving a portrait into a model is to do something like this:
At the moment it is a lot of clicking. The video above is 6 years old from before the Reforged, however the newer versions of my software that support Reforged and were heavily modified and renamed to "Retera Model Studio" (instead of the Matrix Eater) should work in almost exactly the same way we see in this video, except with the added benefit that in the present day the software can preview the animated model and make it easier to see if you succeeded.
Then again... that way of doing things does not account for FaceFX lip sync binding on the Reforged models. Dealing with it might be a royal pain. I don't know how carefully you watched the cinematics in the Reforged campaign, but when a unit says their voice lines the mouth of the unit moves in the portrait preview
and also in the 3D game world, and does so
in a way that matches the exact voice line being spoken. Because of this, it might be the case that every model can only have one FaceFX binding, as a Reforged limitation rather than a Retera Model Studio limitation, which would mean that maybe the process of shoveling the portrait model into the overworld model is not a good idea. If you watch that video above, what folks basically did on the 2003 game was basically a hack. Most units if you look closely, such as the Peon for example, had a highly complex animated face to talk to you, and then a little small face made of only a few triangles for the overworld model. But other units such as the Catapult or a lot of the buildings in the original game all tended to have a camera in the model pointed at the building, or pointed at the catapult, and use exactly the same model for both the portrait preview and the overworld.
So, to save on storage space in the game, the programmers created two modes. The first mode loads a totally separate file, such as for the Peon. It finds this file by looking for
Path\To\The\Model_portrait if the original file used in the overworld was
Path\To\The\Model. But the second mode, for files like the Necropolis that are the same geometry in the overworld or in the portrait preview, is used as a fallback if the file named
_portrait does not exist. That way the original game could cut down on space and just literally load the overworld model for those cases. But, if we use that second mode, in order to show the color background for that unit what we do is to put into the overworld model a giant background plane, but then hide and show it similar to how a Druid of the Claw can hide and show the bear form part of the model when he transforms despite using the same overworld model.
So if you follow the tutorial video from 6 years ago that I pasted above, it would encourage you to put the Reforged portrait file into the original file, and then they will clash because the file can probably only have on Reforged FaceFX lip sync binding. But, actually, if you
almost follow my tutorial, but keep the same geometry of the Reforged overworld model (like the old school 2003 buildings or catapult would do) but then import the background color plane, and the Reforged shiny portrait 3 point lighting (these would be LightEmitter nodes in the
Objects section of import), and then also import the Camera object from the portrait and maybe delete the unused default one in the Reforged overworld model that the Reforged guys put on there in a hurry when they weren't sure if they needed one, I think that might be a reasonable pathway to obtain what you're asking for while also recycling the same FaceFX binding information for the one facial geometry.
Then the other key is to make sure that you have the same Portrait and Portrait Talk animations in the resulting model that were in the old separated portrait model, probably by doing a "Motion from Pre-existing" transfer in my import wizard to cause the overworld model's head and neck to move in a style matching the Reforged separated portrait model -- and to make sure that the background planes you add only show in those animation sequences, and hide in the others, again in a manner not unlike how Druid of the Claw hides his bear when he is in Night Elf form.
If what I am saying doesn't make sense, I'll attach an example model in case that helps. The attached file is neither the Footman model from Reforged, nor the Footman_Portrait model from Reforged. It's a hybrid with animations and data from both, but only the overworld footman copy of the geometry, and that means that it has the working portrait but without you as the user having to import a second file in your custom game to figure it out (in the old days) or to set the
Art Model File now (in the new days from the past two or so weeks).
NOTE: as usual, due to bugs in the Reforged client, this model's portrait only was animated and talking if there was no instance of the original footman model in the custom map, due to FaceFX file linkage. I don't consider that to be an issue with this file, since that's an engine programming problem in Reforged game client itself.
