NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

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Midknightprince
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by Midknightprince »

TheLacus wrote:Hi! The docs explain how to use xml files, have a look ;)

Anyway, smoothness simulates how rough or smooth a material is. You tipically want a low value for wood and stone, and a higher value for glass.


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Metallic affects the amount of reflections. When metallic is 0 there are no reflections, when is 1 you can't see the texture anymore because it fully reflects the environment.

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Spoiler!
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All I'm saying is when you match an XML. file to one of the those textures with the blue .png normal files, it gives it a 3d looking surface.
But you gotta put the smoothness to 0.7 thats all I know..
Leave metal @ 0.0 for that stuff, or yeah, it looks like a mirror..
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King of Worms
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by King of Worms »

Got it thanks .)

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TheLacus
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by TheLacus »

King of Worms wrote: If I lets say clear up the Privateers hold, exit it and than load the save from a castle, my memory gets full again. Id say there should be some MEM Cleaning mechanism included. I THINK that all the textures stay in ram and that it has no limit. I think if you leave the dungeon, that the Monster textures and Dung textures should be wiped out of the ram. That should be a fast process. Than load the new textures etc. That can increase the loading times - I understand that. But something fishy is there, the MEM gets desacrated...

Maybe you can download my texture pack, its just 850mb. And try how it works for you... load a 1st dungeon with many mobs, than go out, than load different save etc. Mem gets full really fast.

And it became very noticeable with my upscaled mosters installed. Even with 1/2 res, MEM gets full quite fast...
I tried it, nice work!
I'm pretty sure the issue you're facing is due to material cache, we'll see what can be done with Interkarma ;)

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King of Worms
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by King of Worms »

Thanks for reply, Im glad you tryed it and like it. It is no doubt very vanilla friendly while it upgrades the visuals, so way to go IMO. Im happy that you will look into that problem with Interkarma, would be great to be able to have those flats in-game without a problem. Than I can continue my work on the town NPCs etc. Theres still lot of work, but I dont want to go there now, when its not clear if it will work and what exact standards should I go with. Esp with the animated NPCs... + thanks for the reply on the shader thread ;)

PS: That super atlass needs to be dealt with :) separated to standard atlasses like the rest.
"97, 205, 211, 212, 213, 301 are in the same "MiscFlats super-atlas" with size 2048"

097 - 22x npc size statues statues
205 - 45x container
211 - 58x misc items
212 - 20x outdoor items, some major
213 - 18x plants, some major
301 - 24x crops
--------------------------------------------------
187 Objects, many of them big in size and important. - and all are finished on my HDD

This CANT be in one atlass

+ I experimented with creating the statues from high res big flats, but now its out of question
097_5-0.png
097_5-0.png (318.58 KiB) Viewed 4188 times
Container example:
205_1-0.png
205_1-0.png (33.54 KiB) Viewed 4188 times
Plants ex:
213_12-0.png
213_12-0.png (342.03 KiB) Viewed 4188 times

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Merlkir
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by Merlkir »

Hi!

I saw your upscaled sprites on the RPGcodex and figured you probably used a NN type upscaler.
Waifu gives good results for clean non-realistic art, good choice!

Have you tried how Let's Enhance would perform? I used it on some ink and watercolor type art before and it looked pretty great, but never on pixel art.

https://letsenhance.io/

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King of Worms
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by King of Worms »

Merlkir wrote:Hi!

I saw your upscaled sprites on the RPGcodex and figured you probably used a NN type upscaler.
Waifu gives good results for clean non-realistic art, good choice!

Have you tried how Let's Enhance would perform? I used it on some ink and watercolor type art before and it looked pretty great, but never on pixel art.

https://letsenhance.io/
Hi, welcome, and thanks for a comment! ;)
1st things 1st... can u please link me that rpgcodex article, Id like to see that!

Thing is, I started with Waifu upscaling, but found it not suitable very fast. But I cant change the Post name now. Waifu is good for specific occasions, but not for Daggerfall flats upscaling in general. It does not enhance the outline, so you have still the 320*200 frame in which the upscaling happens. And the results with faces were not stellar as well. Lots of work and not suitable... still, some NPCs from start are done with Waifu. That blind witch (Oracle I guess) for example.

What I did was, I used the program called Image Resizer. It has literaly almost 100 options of upscale algoritms. And the one I found is the best for this particular use is called XBR4x and I do the double pass. It creates some artefacts at the edge of the image, and I iron those out manually...there are videos of such a process in the thread.

Waifu I used for the main menu theme pic, Court picture, werewolf/wereboar character backgrounds and thats cca it.

I will check the lets enhance now, thanks a lot for heads up :!:

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Merlkir
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by Merlkir »

It wasn't an article, just a post in this thread:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.ph ... 06/page-32

I figured different textures would give different results with various algorithms, yeah.

LH is good at adding (inventing basically) in detail and "texture", but it tends to lose a bit of tiny dark features. (like eyes or thin lines like fingers, those get thinned out a bit)

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King of Worms
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by King of Worms »

Thanks for a link. Tryed the upscaler u send, unusable :)

ifkopifko
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by ifkopifko »

So that I would not be OT in the screenshot thread, here goes... :D
King of Worms wrote:With the sprite/flats upscaling, its a complicated situation. Trust me, I tryed lower resolutions and 10s of other variants. But it doesnt work the way I want. Only good result is with XBR4x. That means that for example 64x32 texture becomes 256x128. If than I repeat the process one more time, it becomes 1024x512 and thats what I do. I do so, because this way the result is the best, and there is no other way around. Its the algorhitm which behaves like that and thats the bottom line.

Than I can take the resulting sprite, open in photoshop and reduce the resolution. Thing is, I can only reduce in whole numbers, so the options are 75% 50% and 25% of the original. 75% is unnoticeable decrease in quality. 50% is the LOWEST you can go, there is like 5% - 10% decrease in quality, so thats ideal. 25% is unusable.
001.jpg
I understand your point and if it does not make a difference performance-wise, then your approach is correct. I am going to think out loudly for a while, please don't take it as criticism, I think you are going an awesome job. :!:

I would just like to point out, that sprites are good at creating an illusion at some distance. I doubt that at reasonable distance you can see the difference between 75% and 50%. Sure you can see it close up, but then you can clearly see it for what it is... just an ugly sprite. :D Wasting too much resources on it is inefficient imho. But again, if it doesn't cost performance, my comment is invalidated. Just my thoughts... keep up the good work, I can't wait to see it finished.

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King of Worms
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Re: NPC Flats - Waifu upscaling

Post by King of Worms »

Ive read this a while back but have not replyed, I will wait for new compression and cache systems to be implemented, than I will evaluate. I really DONT like downscaling my work, because it REDUCES the quality - and the quality is very fragile, every step down makes the upscaling less and less beneficial - I want to squeeze absolute MAXIMUM from the old original textures. Ive learned HOW to do it, and now we will get it in the game working. We will get there one way or another, but it will be done :twisted:

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