[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
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/437344778267525130/963016401482821652/tile4512.png

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?

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/777004635021246486/963895306817269820/tile4512.png

Second frame

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/777004635021246486/963899264877084732/tile4513.png

[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 :P 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.

https://i.imgur.com/sCjSEbL.png

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.

https://i.imgur.com/sCjSEbL.png
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

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/437344778267525130/967856802119184444/tile4512.png

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

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/898943605446680597/967845266042548254/stripper3dface.png

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

Spoiler

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/898943605446680597/967859272752975922/tile4512.png