HD sprites & portraits

[Sitrus]

If you up for redoing that

Nah, I was just being curious so far. I'm still stuck on CPU (it seems that my NVIDIA card is too old for this) which limits my operations if free time weren't the only issue, so I'm not exactly in a good position to offer substantial help with actually processing any amount of sprites.

I wasn't able to download the entire archive from the link you provided, it goes too slow for me to get over 1GiB in reasonable time. But from what Sitrus showed in the other thread (specifically here where you can see the staircase pixel effect on the cape and other parts, and also here on the foot) it seemed to me that there could be some roughness on the edges, although perhaps those are results from before neural upscales were used.

With the right combo of pre-processing and neural network employed, the sprite edges come out super smooth.

The jagged edges on those pictures are caused on the cape by me not using proper alpha channels at that time, and for the foot my pure laziness to fix it. They are not caused by the neural network. I'll get to figuring out the alpha channels eventually, as it is super apparent that for example long hair requires alpha channel masks so it doesn't clip under clothes/armor. DFU also dislikes super high resolution textures and it downscales them in a weird way, which is another thing I need to figure out.

[King of Worms]

Really, the most important thing here was to get ALL the items in ALL the materials variants (and color variants in case of clothing) out of the game, than increase its resolution to the size where artist can start to work on it.

This is exactly the reason why I hesitated even considering any attempt at upscale except for testing purposes. There are so many clothing item colours and materials, with no easy way to do colour changes after the upscale unless you want to drop back to the original 8-bit palette which doesn't really look good on the enlarged images.

BTW, did you do 8x or 16x upscales, or both?

I guess its 4x? The upscales were done by Adrinus so Im not sure, but ESRGAN 4x is the standard I Think.

Lacus wrote a script which allowed us to export all the variants. When you mod the paperdoll the palette change function cease to work so u must supply all the variants manualy. Thats why it has cca 13 000 files. All things considered, this is crazy

[MrFlibble]

They are not caused by the neural network.

Glad to hear that!

Proper handling of sprite edges by NNs was still a problem some half year ago so I thought I could share my experience if that was an issue

I'm still trying to figure out the best method with the new networks available, with intermediate results posted here.

[Nordman]

Hello Daggerfall Unity enthusiasts!

I'm still learning and trying new things with daggerfall sprites and portraits. On my quest for understanding humanoid face features i'm creating replacement for Daggerfall portraits. These are AI-generated-crossbred, hand-retouched, AI-upscaled/downscaled portraits

Dunmer_Females_DU.jpg (720.87 KiB) Viewed 1815 times

Looks kinda silly with default UI

DaggerfallUnity_2020jpg.jpg (340.9 KiB) Viewed 1815 times

[BadLuckBurt]

Hello Daggerfall Unity enthusiasts!

I'm still learning and trying new things with daggerfall sprites and portraits. On my quest for understanding humanoid face features i'm creating replacement for Daggerfall portraits. These are AI-generated-crossbred, hand-retouched, AI-upscaled/downscaled portraits

Dunmer_Females_DU.jpg



Looks kinda silly with default UI

DaggerfallUnity_2020jpg.jpg

By Azura! That looks incredibly good I wonder if they would survive downscaling to bring them to a level that suits the original UI. Don't get me wrong, they look great but I don't play with upscaled UI so I'm just going to see what happens when I reduce the sizes, hope you don't mind.

[MasonFace]

Those AI generated faces look really really good! Can you detail your methodology? I'm having a hard time conceiving how you achieved this.

[Nordman]

I'm just going to see what happens when I reduce the sizes, hope you don't mind.

Not at all, i'll upload individual files so you could more easily modify them.

Those AI generated faces look really really good! Can you detail your methodology? I'm having a hard time conceiving how you achieved this.

Sure, i should have done it in the first place

I use www.artbreeder.com on private mode (your generated content can't be seen by others)to AI-generate a portrait, either based on my own uploads or the result of at least 3 crossbreedings. When i like the base portrait i photoshop it (mainly liquifying and painting) to obtain the final result. Then i Ai-upscale the portrait to add little details, to make it less blurry, and to finish i downsize it to jpeg.

Looks something like that.



I use Adam Adamowicz's concept arts as inspiration for different races. For dunmers : elongated alien-looking heads, almond-shaped red eyes...




For Nords : Robust, square-shaped faces, blue-eyed...



Based on :

[MasonFace]

Man, that's really cool stuff. Thanks for sharing!

[enderandrew]

It is a shame you didn't get the paperdolls working for some reason.

I'd really like to see nicer paperdolls, heads and portraits.

I'd upload two versions, one in the highest quality and one downscaled a bit closer to the UI and original game and let people pick whichever they prefer.

[King of Worms]

It is a shame you didn't get the paperdolls working for some reason.

I'd really like to see nicer paperdolls, heads and portraits.

I'd upload two versions, one in the highest quality and one downscaled a bit closer to the UI and original game and let people pick whichever they prefer.

Nice idea, why dont you do it than?