[Phredreeke]

Yeah, of the ones MrFlibble has shown that one shows the most promise.

Who made the model though?

[MrFlibble]

 Phredreeke, on 08 October 2020 - 11:47 AM, said:

Here are some I think MrFlibble will like

They use Lollypop interpolated with LyonHrt's XBRDD model (at 0.4)

I actually had a similar idea! However this looks pretty much like real xBRZ as opposed to making the images more pixel-arty. If I were to aim for this look I'd simply use one of LyonHrt's Rebout models or maybe even charsprite.

 Mark, on 08 October 2020 - 01:29 PM, said:

The ones a couple posts up look good except for the distorted blue ring. I noticed it in other posts too.

Unfortunately I found no model so far that would do a better job with the telepad ring (and similar patterns in other textures) than this.

 Phredreeke, on 08 October 2020 - 01:48 PM, said:

Yeah, of the ones MrFlibble has shown that one shows the most promise.

Who made the model though?

I found it in one of the folders with models by DinJerr, so I would tentatively assume it's by the same user, but it's worth mentioning that the folder is called MIrror (sic) which may theoretically suggest otherwise.

The same folder also contains a model called Fatality MKII (I sense a pun here) which might be worth checking out as well. It makes the results sharper compared to CleanPixels and adds some noise/invented detail to the image, but the result may look grainy (examples downscaled and palettised the same way as in my previous post):
https://imgsli.com/MjQ5NDE
https://imgsli.com/MjQ5NDM
https://imgsli.com/MjQ5NDQ

Additionally if you go up from the MachineLearning folder here, there's a model called 4x_Lady0101_314000_G.pth (which is different from the Lady models I found earlier -- I thought they were mentioned at the Upscale Wiki but apparently not) that tries to make output look like a painting with simulated brush strokes. It's softer than Fatality MKII and produces a distinct look on the textures, but after downscaling and palettising this leaves patterns that might not be desirable. For comparison's sake I'm posting the same three textures as in the slides above processed with this model:

Spoiler

[Phredreeke]

there's a Fatality MKIII model as well. It does a mostly decent job with the real life sourced faces

[MrFlibble]

I just discovered that Fatality MKII can do a very decent job with painted faces (Daggerfall), I should try MKIII too.

Spoiler

[Phredreeke]

Did an attempt to improve quality of palette swaps for the pickup sprites. Not the best results but it's an improvement




Edit: Thinking about it, these ones probably don't matter for the "ERP" anyway as they will be replaced with voxels.

[Phredreeke]

I've compiled some problem tiles if anyone wants to take a shot at.

Spoiler

Perhaps some actual labels on the chips?

I could have improved the top part of the logo using a higher resolution counterpart from elsewhere, but I have nothing for the "Studios" part

The labels on the left side could be filled in with actual text. Further, this is a tile where parts may look better lifted from the Lollypop upscale



Lots of screens with alien glyphs here. In addition the last two are missing fullbrights but I can fix those.


I have a higher quality Duke face for the sprite that I will try inserting later.

ORDER HERE text got mangled in upscale

WANTED text used in several tiles, but it only needs to be done once then I'll copy it to the other tiles. Also need to find the hi-res developer images as mentioned by Mark previously in the thread.

[Mark]

I know those dev heads are out there somewhere But I didn't find the thread with a quick search. I did find this one one that would take a little more effort to cut/paste new tiles.
https://forums.duke4...618#entry124618

[Phredreeke]

I know I've seen at least the Todd photo elsewhere though

[Mark]

Since I can't figure out the proper search terms to find them in the forums I'll start looking on my backup drives. But if I didn't name the file with something logical I might not find them there either. I found another higher res version of my previous pic. I'll post it if I can't find the others today.

[Phredreeke]

The previous pic may still be useful for other faces

Edit: Using the image Mark linked to I improved tile 4889

Also 4385

[Jimmy]

 Phredreeke, on 11 October 2020 - 09:40 AM, said:

Perhaps some actual labels on the chips?

Some nerd out there may be able to tell you exactly what that was a photo of. If you could get someone like LGR to tweet about it, I bet you'd come up with an answer. Maybe even someone could replicate the texture, I believe someone did that for some of the Doom textures before.

[Phredreeke]

And another. Unfortunately I could only find a really poor quality photo scanned from a German magazine. All things considered I think it worked out alright. The WANTED text is just a placeholder



Also, a further tweak of the Allen Blum poster, after I realised I could use the spacesuit sprite as an additional source

[MrFlibble]

That's the spirit!

Assuming higher-quality source pictures were found for other textures and/or sprites, would those be given priority over upscales? (I'd vote for the affirmative answer.) Perhaps some have been found earlier during the previous phases of HRP development?

[OpenMaw]

 MrFlibble, on 12 October 2020 - 06:48 AM, said:

That's the spirit!

Assuming higher-quality source pictures were found for other textures and/or sprites, would those be given priority over upscales? (I'd vote for the affirmative answer.) Perhaps some have been found earlier during the previous phases of HRP development?

I know there was the magazine scan of the skyline used in the game and that some of the alien textures are derived from HR Giger art. It probably wouldn't be too hard to follow the steps that 3DR took to create the original textures in true color with higher resolution.

[Tea Monster]

I'm pretty sure that they have. You'd have to trawl through the 'spritely appearance' threads to get details. I know they found the original photos used in the shotgun sprite.
There are a lot of wall textures that have been done for the HRP. Many are done to a high standard of finish and closely resemble the original tiles. In cases where it isn't possible to achieve an acceptable AI result, it may be possible to use one of the HRP tiles.

With proper art direction, making a faithful high-res set of replacements should be possible.

[Phredreeke]

[OpenMaw]

 Tea Monster, on 12 October 2020 - 07:29 AM, said:

I'm pretty sure that they have. You'd have to trawl through the 'spritely appearance' threads to get details. I know they found the original photos used in the shotgun sprite.
There are a lot of wall textures that have been done for the HRP. Many are done to a high standard of finish and closely resemble the original tiles. In cases where it isn't possible to achieve an acceptable AI result, it may be possible to use one of the HRP tiles.

With proper art direction, making a faithful high-res set of replacements should be possible.

Granted, but the biggest concern I would have with taking from the HRP and mixing with AI up scaling and manually modified textures is an inconsistency. I think it would be better to do everything new and only implement those HRP assets that truly fit the feel that the AI upscales evoke. That was the big downfall of the HRP as a whole was that things were just all over the place. Some things felt very cartoony, others felt current gen with high fidelity, others felt like photo-sourced photoshop. It made it a little uncomfortable to play after awhile. Honestly, have a clean break with those assets and letting this new Upscale Resource Pack with the Voxels as a sister project and the really nice updated skyboxes that you did all working in tandem would create, probably, the best Duke Nukem 3D experience we've ever seen.

[Phredreeke]

The big problems for AI upscaling are faces and text.

Depending on the texture, it may be possible to downscale and palettise the HRP texture and still have it fit. Also I'm not sure if I mentioned but for indexed hightiles to work their size have to be a multiple of that of the original texture.

[Jimmy]

It's been a while and I can't check it out right now, but I do think that Lameduke has 1 or 2 textures that are 2x bigger than what ended up being in the final game.

[Phredreeke]

Thank you. LameDuke's tile 368 is indeed a higher resolution version of retail's 720

Edit: Randy's mugshot done

[Mark]

I give up. I searched a handful of forum threads, including the 3 most likely threads, back to late 2017 and couldn't find the high res dev pics that were posted. Evidently when I saved them to my backup drive I didn't name the file/files with something that would stand out and give me a hint what they are.

[Phredreeke]

It's ok, I'm done with the mugshots anyway

I might do the Faces of Death textures too but that's lower priority as the level isn't found in normal play (also if I do I want to restore the 1.3D faces...)

[Phredreeke]

All around me are familiar faces...



Also thought I'd share a tool I found very useful for repositioning faces in vintage 3DR photos to get an angle closer to that of the tile I'm working with https://cvl-demos.cs...k/vrn/index.php

[MrFlibble]

 Phredreeke, on 14 October 2020 - 08:49 AM, said:

All around me are familiar faces...

Some seem to appear as if the face was taken from a different picture and pasted onto the upscale, is that so?

 OpenMaw, on 12 October 2020 - 11:17 AM, said:

Granted, but the biggest concern I would have with taking from the HRP and mixing with AI up scaling and manually modified textures is an inconsistency.

I would not entirely agree. The original textures too come from different sources -- some are photographs that were downscaled, some are based on photographs but edited manually, some hand-drawn from scratch. AI upscales are not a magic solution, and they too may (and often do) produce inconsistent results. As in, you get one picture right and the other is a complete mess.

I believe that the ultimate equaliser here is the target resolution and the 8-bit palette. Manual touch-ups are inevitable and should not be discarded, because so far we do not have a perfect AI upscaler that will impeccably redraw pixel art in double or quadruple the original resolution. As long as we clearly define what kind of high-res version of the textures should be the acceptable standard, and the results -- no matter how they were achieved, AI or manually -- do not deviate from this standard, consider the task accomplished I say.

[Phredreeke]

 MrFlibble, on 14 October 2020 - 09:03 AM, said:

Some seem to appear as if the face was taken from a different picture and pasted onto the upscale, is that so?

Yes. In fact all are, just that as I progressed I got better and better at aligning the results. I linked the tool I used to reposition photos for it.

[MrFlibble]

Have you considered just using different photos altogether? I know it's a minor detail and these tiles are not widely used anyway, but there is a notable contrast between the detail on the faces and the rest of the upscale.

I also believe it would not hurt to manually edit the text part of each poster -- not just the red WANTED sign, I know you took care of it already -- but the rest of the illegible text too. Keep it illegible but make it high res? I think it should be doable.

[Phredreeke]

I don't see what the point would be using a different photo... you'd still get the contrast in quality between photo and the rest of the upscale. I tweaked a few of them (by repositioning parts of the face, or for Doug's face tweaking the brightness) to be closer to the originals.



As for editing the rest of the poster, it's a great idea, but I think others would do a better job than me at it

[OpenMaw]

 MrFlibble, on 14 October 2020 - 09:03 AM, said:

I believe that the ultimate equaliser here is the target resolution and the 8-bit palette. Manual touch-ups are inevitable and should not be discarded, because so far we do not have a perfect AI upscaler that will impeccably redraw pixel art in double or quadruple the original resolution. As long as we clearly define what kind of high-res version of the textures should be the acceptable standard, and the results -- no matter how they were achieved, AI or manually -- do not deviate from this standard, consider the task accomplished I say.

That's what I said.

The difference between the HRP and the original game is that everything in the original game feels cohesive. There's a difference between differing sources and hodge podge.

[Phredreeke]

[MrFlibble]

 Phredreeke, on 15 October 2020 - 01:22 PM, said:

I don't see what the point would be using a different photo... you'd still get the contrast in quality between photo and the rest of the upscale.

Well it seemed to me that since the original photographs are unavailable and ESRGAN does not do a good job with this kind of images, one could just as well remake the entire posters with different pictures of the same people, because what's left of the original low-res images is not really that meaningful (the overall silhouette and hair).

I mean, the comparison between the low-res versions and the edited upscales with pasted-on faces that you posted previously highlights the difference pretty well. Many simply don't look like the same face but at higher resolution. Even with the little detail that the originals have, you can still see that the eyes are looking in a different direction or the mouth/facial expression is different etc.

So essentially this gets into a stone soup kind of situation where the AI upscale does not actually make that much of an important contribution to the final result, and since the edited upscales are not entirely authentic anyway, perhaps it could would be more consistent to just remake these posters with complete but different dev pics? I believe there are precedents to this kind of practice and that it will not be detrimental to the quality of the HRP.

Of course you could further edit these upscales and maybe achieve even greater consistency with the low-res originals in the way each face looks, like the direction of the gaze and the facial expression. And maybe if the end result looks good it will not matter whether they were entirely made from high-res photos or composed from an upscale, different pictures plus some manual editing.

That said, you did a good job with these last three posters shown above, definitely an improvement!

With the presidential portraits, an excellent job here. I understand there was little trouble in finding high quality versions of those but still a good application of your skill to get the faces on the upscaled images. Perhaps Lincoln's necktie could use some sharper detail but other than that, impeccable results.

 OpenMaw, on 15 October 2020 - 01:24 PM, said:

The difference between the HRP and the original game is that everything in the original game feels cohesive. There's a difference between differing sources and hodge podge.

If HRP assets are edited in a consistent way, it will remain cohesive. But you won't achieve that by simply throwing everything into ESRGAN and palettising output.

And I would not agree that if the majority of art has to be AI upscaled, but some assets can be produced from the same high resolution source images as the low-res original textures, this will turn HRP into "hodge podge". A few pages back Phredreeke posted some edited textures (hidden under the spolier tag) where he used higher resolution images like the title screen/box cover art or the in-game sprite to make higher fidelity images including the Lunar Apocalypse movie poster. I don't believe you object to these?