[MrFlibble]

Phredreeke, on 25 January 2020 - 11:09 AM, said:

BTW. New model I've been testing https://imgsli.com/MTEzNzY

TBH it looks extremely odd. What use could there be of this one?

[Phredreeke]

It does indeed.

As with the pixelity-faces model, this isn't gonna be useful on its own I think. However, given how hard it is to upscale faces, if this can do a decent job it can be used for patching in faces to otherwise working upscales.

It can also be used to create disturbing painting for use as background decorations.

[Phredreeke]

Upscaled Hung Lo sprite with custom face

[MrFlibble]

What do you think about this?


This is DigiPaint/rebout_interp interpolation at alpha = 0.8, and I used Scattered (effect) when palettizing to produce some neat noise. Scaled to 2x with Bicubic better.

[Phredreeke]

[MrFlibble]

I was checking out new models in the database and noticed that the one called Spongebob v6 De-Quantize actually does a very good job on low-res stuff, except it makes the colours fade very noticeably. I interpolated it with rebout_interp at alpha = 0.8 and got some very decent results -- unlike any previous attempt I'm reluctant to scale down 4x output to lower res.

No image pre-processing was involved prior to upscale. The only downside is that I had to use GIMP's Auto Color Enhance to get the colours a bit less faded.

Here's some side-by-side comparison of a few full-size screenshots (aspect ratio not fixed):

Flight of the Amazon Queen
https://imgsli.com/MTMzMjE

The Legend of Kyrandia
https://imgsli.com/MTMzMjI

Lands of Lore
https://imgsli.com/MTMzMjM

The Legend of Kyrandia 2
https://imgsli.com/MTMzMjQ

Igor: Objective Uikokahonia (or whatever)
https://imgsli.com/MTMzMjU

[MrFlibble]

I couldn't resist trying this out.


Both were done using the same SpongeBob model as in the post above. I used GIMP's Color Enhance (legacy) to brighten up colours because the model fades them quite noticeably. Downscaled to 2x and palettized using mtPaint.

[Phredreeke]

This was processed first with the SSAntialias9x model followed by the digitalframes 2.1 final model. Surprisingly good result for such a small sprite

[MrFlibble]

It looks as if someone redrew the sprite in a stylised way similar to those cel-shading graphics from XIII and the like.

[Fantinaikos]

HacX finally got a texture upgrade pack. All ingame 3255 textures have been neural-upscaled according the creator.

[MrFlibble]

I haven't checked it out yet but it seems well done.

[Phredreeke]

A few days ago - inspired by Dzierzan's SmoothBlood mod - I decided to attempt interpolating new frames from my Shadow Warrior weapon upscales





(these are 100% the result of interpolating, no manual edits, the only thing I did was my usual downscale from 4x to 2x size and palettising)

[Dzierzan]

Whoever designed this +/- system is... ehh... I accidentally clicked minus. Sorry, phredreeke! By the way this looks great !

[MrFlibble]

Was interpolation achieved using a neural network or some other means?

The Grenade Launcher animation sure needs some manual cleanup.

[Phredreeke]

The interpolation itself is not using a neural network. It's just MVTools for Avisynth.

I picked these because I saw them as the best candidates, but they all need manual cleanup.



Upscaled tesla cannon animation, which Dzierzan used (downscaled to 1x size) for his SmoothBlood mod.

[MrFlibble]

The smooth animation on the Tesla cannon is good, but what are you going to do with the "dancing" patterns of dithered pixels, especially noticeable on the muzzle?

Also there's some noticeable ringing that I guess results from sharpening that is very noticeable on the edge of the brown part of the weapon, right near the animated area.

[Phredreeke]

I believe that is from the GIF conversion.

I think if it's an issue I could take one still frame and overlay it if the pixel difference is under a certain threshold.

[Phredreeke]

A trick I've discovered on how to deal with badly scaled source tiles

First, scale the tile to 200% size in the opposite axis of where the bad scaling is done (for example, if the image has rows that are repeated horizontally you scale it vertically) then soften it. Run the result through the unresize model, then downscale it back to the prior size.

https://imgsli.com/MTc0NzI

Now you have an image that is a lot friendlier to most models. Here is my final result

https://imgsli.com/MTc0NzE

[MrFlibble]

Phredreeke, on 11 April 2020 - 04:49 PM, said:

This was processed first with the SSAntialias9x model followed by the digitalframes 2.1 final model. Surprisingly good result for such a small sprite
CASS1_rlt_rlt.png

Here's the same frame with the SpongeBob/Rebout interpolation I mentioned earlier:

Far from excellent but it bears a certain resemblance to the original sprite.

[MusicallyInspired]

There's a new AI upscaler specifically for low-res faces called Pulse. It's trained to combine elements from photos of faces. Might be worth something. Not all of them are very successful, but might be worth considering to use in some fashion. I also find it hilarious that the upscale of Hitler from Wolf3D bears a striking resemblance to Randy Pitchford.

http://pulse.cs.duke...9ROgdx5CRFCJ3Ik

This fork allows to have it done offline instead of on the cloud...somehow. I haven't looked into it yet.

https://github.com/g...R7FmNlkb8tRCfbQ

Some examples (very large images):

Spoiler

[MrFlibble]

MusicallyInspired, on 14 June 2020 - 09:05 AM, said:

Some examples (very large images):

Some of these are very good like the Ultima portraits but man, what use could that be for AI upscales? The best results are basically photorealistic images of random guys/gals that very vaguely resemble the source material.

Also the BJ Blazkowitz face is why you should do aspect ratio correction before messing with this kind of processing.

On a separate note, I've been playing around with Command & Conquer DOS FMVs, being highly dissatisfied with how the Remastered videos turned out. So far the results are mixed bag, what do you think?

GDI Orca mission briefing

Nod officer at guard tower

Construction yard unpacking

This is already the third attempt, this time the model is an interpolation of Spongebob v6 De-Quantize by Joey and 4x_BigFace by DinJerr (from here), alpha = 0.5.

UPD: Correction, the actual model was a 0.5 interpolation of SpongeBob De-Quantize and DevianPixelHD, which was then again interpolated at 0.5 with 4x_BigFace. Apologies for the wrong information.

[t800]

Well, I doubt real practical usage but some of those examples are quite funny, like BJ. Wondering how Doomguy and Duke would look.

[MusicallyInspired]

You're right really. It's more of a novelty.

Here's a proper aspect ratio-corrected BJ:



Also, I had to laugh at this one:

[Phredreeke]

[MrFlibble]

t800, on 14 June 2020 - 09:58 AM, said:

Wondering how Doomguy and Duke would look.

SOME QUESTIONS ARE BETTER LEFT UNANSWERED

[Marphy Black]

Is the online version just not working now? I keep getting a "Google Drive quota exceeded" error after uploading any image.

[MusicallyInspired]

Yeah it has problems. It's generally deemed not reliable. Some guy figured out how to get it to run offline but I haven't spent the time to figure it out yet.

[Rellik]

I've seen a better version of the Doom Guy:

(The smiling mouth had to be added manually because the AI couldn't identify the teeth.)

[MrFlibble]

Rellik, on 15 June 2020 - 08:05 PM, said:

I've seen a better version of the Doom Guy:

From what I remember, the creation of this one involved quite a lof of manual input, not just someone ran the original HUD face through a neural network and viola.

But this new Pulse thing just shows how powerful neural networks can be in speficied tasks. Imagine someone trained one to specifically create high-res pixel art or 3D-render-looking sprites instead of photorealistic faces from low-res images, for example.

[Phredreeke]

This was made similar to the Duke and Lo Wang sprite upscales, except here I made the face by combining several different frames for the face. The result was then blended back with the original upscale.

Edit: This is actually an animation, but turns out you'll have to click it to play on the forum.