How difficult would it be to have animated portraits in game?

Well smite does it. So it shouldn't be hard

ooh! What about animated portraits in champ select?

Hey guys,

As a digital production artist (not riot) I can say that swapping out the portraits for animations would probably take more time than we think as it is probably referenced in quite a bit of coding throughout the game. That aside, another issue I would see, is that any animated file format is significantly larger than a regular image, so it could very well add a lot of extra strain on the servers (not that riot couldn't do it!)

I would love to see the animations as they are beautiful, but figured I would chip in as I do this kind of stuff for a living.

-Sword