Phredreeke, on 14 April 2022 - 07:13 AM, said:
To be clear. The last two had a fair amount of editing done to the faces. They're not straight downscales from the AI
Also, aside from the very first Duke upscale pack, there was always some amount of manual editing done.
I know that, I'm sorry if something that I said above implied otherwise -- not my intention!
It's just that from my experience with ESRGAN, its output, regardless of the model used, is pretty much hit-and-miss. It might look right in some cases, very good even, but in others, you either need extensive manual edits or discard the result altogether.
Not so with a skilled artist of
sebabdukeboss20's calibre: in this case the end result is from the start created to match the style and visual design of the source material, and built upon that to enhance the look.
MrFlibble, on 14 April 2022 - 07:08 AM, said:
I take it that AA sprites were created from higher-res models? Perhaps you could ask sebabdukeboss20 to produce 2x versions for the project?
Or actually you know what, you could upscale this 1.5x version with ESRGAN and then downsample it to the 2x size. Considering that ESRGAN has always show very decent results with upscaling pre-rendered sprites, this could be an interesting option.
Of course, that is if you get the permission to use those assets from the AA team. Personally, I'd much prefer these new versions to just plain AI upscales of the low-res sprites, which I don't believe actually look better than the low-res originals in most cases, and sometimes there are minor issues here and there that are actually for the worse, unless corrected manually. AA sprites are known to work well in-game, they're fresh and still depict the same monsters and the low-resolution originals. True, they are not made from the same models, but even official high-res updates of characters from some games (e. g. the Mac version of
Wolf3D,
Doom 64 or the re-release of
Marathon 2) used completely different sprite work compared to their original counterparts.