[Danukem]

Personally I think the marbled look in the original was way better and had more depth.

[Phredreeke]

TBH the more I look at it the more I agree

[Phredreeke]

New sprite for Babeland


Above used DeepPrivacy on the upscaled sprite to replace the faces - then the eyepatch was edited back on.

[MrFlibble]

The left one looks like a younger version of Mrs. Merkel to me, and the right one kind of like some random biker dude.

Also it seems that the facial features are a bit too small, making them look burlier than they were originally supposed to be. At least, this is the impression that I'm having.

[Phredreeke]

Tweaked it a bit, better?



Second frame

[Aleks]

I'm not sure about their faces to be honest, they look either like men or like they're in their 50s, not sure that's the intention of an interactive hot pirate robot babes Also the bodies seem a bit bulky, not sure if that's because of the smaller facial features or because the upscaling makes it more apparent that the legs or arms don't vary so much with thickness over length.

[MrFlibble]

Phredreeke, on 13 April 2022 - 12:32 PM, said:

Tweaked it a bit, better?

In both versions, the faces look nothing like they are in the original image.

Hasn't sebabdukeboss20 made higher-res remakes for these sprites? I believe this is the case when an artist's work is definitely more preferable to AI output, because the latter is neither closer to the source material nor better in quality. I mean, both ESRGAN and DeepFace have made considerable alterations to the original image that it can no longer be considered 100% authentic, so why rely on AI's randomness when there's an artist that can consistently reimagine the same image in a style that closely matches the original assets' appearance and visual technique.

[Danukem]

MrFlibble, on 14 April 2022 - 02:06 AM, said:

Hasn't sebabdukeboss20 made higher-res remakes for these sprites?

Yeah here is one of the 4 frames of animation.



He wasn't trying to make it exactly the same. I don't think that you can do much with the original pixelated faces anyway. If you look closely at the original sprites, they really do seem to have dude faces. The one on the right (in the original art) looks like Howard Stern.

[Phredreeke]

I don't want to poach sprites from AA though, and even if I were to use them the 1.5:1 scale AA uses is incompatible with the indexed hightile implementation in classic renderer

[jkas789]

Danukem, on 14 April 2022 - 02:27 AM, said:

Yeah here is one of the 4 frames of animation.


If you look closely at the original sprites, they really do seem to have dude faces. The one on the right (in the original art) looks like Howard Stern.

I mean, maybe...



Lol sorry, I had to.

[MrFlibble]

Phredreeke, on 14 April 2022 - 04:52 AM, said:

I don't want to poach sprites from AA though, and even if I were to use them the 1.5:1 scale AA uses is incompatible with the indexed hightile implementation in classic renderer

I take it that AA sprites were created from higher-res models? Perhaps you could ask sebabdukeboss20 to produce 2x versions for the project?

It's certainly going to be prettier than the AI upscales. I don't believe you started the ERP project just for the sake of using ESRGAN upscales to create 2x versions of every sprite and texture, without considering the artistic value of the result? We now know that ESRGAN alone often falls short of producing pretty images, and agreed that in some cases hand-made textures like those from the HRP are a better choice.

If the end goal of ERP is to provide a high-definition experience that is an improvement upon the low-res originals, I'd say if you can use help from an actual artist, then it's better to use it than try to extricate an improvement in quality from AI networks.

Danukem, on 14 April 2022 - 02:27 AM, said:

I don't think that you can do much with the original pixelated faces anyway. If you look closely at the original sprites, they really do seem to have dude faces. The one on the right (in the original art) looks like Howard Stern.

I looked up the original sprites just now, and the left one does look like a girl face to me alright. The right one is more ambiguous because of the eye patch.

But even if they do look like dudes, this wasn't likely the intended effect, rather than a result of the limitations imposed by the low resolution. No reason to carry this over to what is supposed to be a higher-definition improvement.

Don't get me wrong, what Phredreeke does with the networks is impressive, and the left girl's face is actually pretty realistic -- it's just that this is probably not the kind of face that I imagined for the character here. Anyway, of course it's up to Phredreeke to decide what's best for the project.

[Phredreeke]

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.

[MrFlibble]

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.

[Phredreeke]

Update to pirate sprite



Ended up taking the face from the stripper and repositioning using this site Here's a high-res render if interested of that if interested

Spoiler

Still took a lot of edits but hopefully it doesn't look like a man anymore. And here's a bonus titty version

Spoiler

[darkprince227]

How are things going here?

[Phredreeke]

Kinda stalled if I’m to be honest.

- The next version will have the new HD sounds from Dzierzan’s pack
- Skyboxes will have palette variants added for user episodes from the addon compilation
- There are a few addons in the compilation that will need its LOGO.ANM renamed to something else to not have the upscaled nuke logo override them. I’ve queried about that in the relevant thread without a clear response
- A piece of CON code was contributed by Doom64Hunter that skips the episode select of the Vaca and DC expansions
- I’ve not updated the voxels included, this is something that I’m holding back until it’s ready for release
- The SC-55 music pack will need minor modification to ensure it doesn’t override the Grabbag theme used in Vaca. Also I’d like to include the Vaca tracks but I recall MusicallyInspired wanting to revise those recordings so I’m holding off their inclusion until such time
- Finally, the pack remains to be refactored to use Doom64Hunter’s new addon system. Currently it handles addons using grpinfo files setting a different def file

BTW the ERP did make an uncredited appearance in Civvie’s latest video, you can see upscaled graphics in the brief footage of Duke3D in it

[Dzierzan]

Quote

I’ve not updated the voxels included, this is something that I’m holding back until it’s ready for release

I am not getting this part. Why can't you just copy and paste?

[Phredreeke]

Shhh... I'm trying to make it sound like it's more work than it really is

There's the matter of the vaca voxels but I'm inclined to leave those disabled as last I checked there were issues with switches appearing where they shouldn't and parasols having the wrong Y offsets.

Do we have a Pearl health voxel yet anyway?

[Jimmy]

Danukem, on 14 April 2022 - 02:27 AM, said:

Their heads are fucking gigantic.

[Phredreeke]

I don’t blame sebab for that, I have a hard time fitting facial detail in on the upscale and I’m working on a 33% larger scale. Though maybe if you made their heads larger you should also increase the size of their boobs

[Dzierzan]

The general quality of vacation voxels is mediocre/low (there are some good exceptions). I am planning making my own ones in the far uncertain future. I know I sound rude towards mxrtxn, but I just think not everything should have been added, like there was no quality control.

[Jimmy]

Phredreeke, on 06 June 2022 - 09:03 AM, said:

I don’t blame sebab for that, I have a hard time fitting facial detail in on the upscale and I’m working on a 33% larger scale. Though maybe if you made their heads larger you should also increase the size of their boobs

You can always adjust the scale of the other body parts much like the original Duke3D models so the heads don't look so bad. It's just bad character design, and I'm not sure Sebab is the modeler for that project. Your most recent pirate upscale looks fine in my opinion, they're robot pirate women. If they look sorta gruff, it fits. My only crit would be that the eye patch looks weird but I'm sure you already know that.

[Danukem]

Phredreeke, on 05 June 2022 - 02:43 PM, said:

There's the matter of the vaca voxels but I'm inclined to leave those disabled as last I checked there were issues with switches appearing where they shouldn't

AFAIK it is generally the case for voxels that they do not obey the one-sided cstat, which means that switches that should not be visible will be visible. There are many of these throughout hundreds of maps, not only the original episodes but expansion packs and user maps. And it is not confined to "hidden" switches, either. It's standard practice to make a switch one-sided if you want to make it look like the player is interacting with some other "switch" sprite. For this reason I continue to omit all switch and button voxels from my projects since ruining a lot of map areas is not a good tradeoff for having switches look thicker.

EDIT: That was somewhat misstated. Pretty much all switches are one-sided -- the only difference with the hidden ones is they are turned around so that the invisible side faces where the player is looking. This is what makes the problem tricky to fix from the CON code side. Hidden switches and regular switches are indistinguishable from a cstat perspective.

[Phredreeke]

[darkprince227]

WOOHOO! I've been itching to see an Enhanced Duke Caribbean

[darkprince227]

Been almost six months since the last post, has anything happened since then?

[NightFright]

Not until you posted.

[darkprince227]

So, the project's been scrapped? Great