Searching -- partner to implement high quality sprite art replacement mod

[shadowfangs99]

Hello

I am a 2D artist and have recently gotten into Daggerfall Unity. I'm loving the game and noticed that no mod currently exists for sprites that goes beyond up-scaling with minors touches.

I'm interested in exploring filling that gap, manually redrawing all of the sprites to look attractive and appropriate in higher resolution. In order to do this I'm asking/looking for someone (well versed with the game) to handle the back end of implementation as well as feed me the original files to draw from. (I hope that isn't too much to ask) I want to remain faithful to the art style but strongly update the illustrations, so someone to give critical feedback and adjustments would be ideal.

I believe having characters 2D is important to keeping the game's unique old school RPG atmosphere intact while giving it a desperately needed update of clarity. Many sprites were left muddy and smooth by the upscale process, others still are missing faces for frames of animation.

I would like to have a discussion on how many frames per character exist so I can be more aware of the workload this kind of project would entail and what modulation could be considered to have it be piece mailed, (perhaps paper-doll first) without contrasting harshly against incomplete sections. What file type and size would be appropriate etc.

I'm enthusiastic and hopeful that this could be accomplished in a respectable form with reasonable development.

Thank You

[MasonFace]

For the longest time, I had an advertisement up seeking help touching up upscales of the NPC flats, but didn't get any interest, so I narrowed the scope of my Pure Vanilla Extract mod to not include them. It's a massive undertaking and understand completely why no one was able to commit the time to it.

I'm not sure the art will ever look consistent enough in high resolution unless only one artist does all of them. And I just don't know how realistic that is. I mean, it's overwhelming!

I still have download links if you want to download the upscaled NPC flats as a base to work off of. I think the image count in somewhere between 650 and 750, but I'm not exactly sure.

NPC flats Upscaled with Topez Gigapixel AI -These came out really noisy.

Another set of AI upscaled NPC flats using a different AI can be found here, but they came out really buttery. I also have the portraits upscaled there if you want to use those for reference on the NPCs flats.

I've found that you can superimpose the two upscaled results ontop of each other with transparency to help interpolate between them and get decent results, but still not what I'd call "great".

Anyhow, I don't want to scare you away from trying. I think it is something that would really help bring new life to DFU. But man is that a LOT of work!

As far as implementation, it is very very easy. You can either just drop the .PNG files into your streaming assets/textures folder, or I can assist you with packaging a .dfmod file for distribution.

[shadowfangs99]

This is precisely the info I was looking for, thank you.

Would you be willing to discuss this in more detail in Discord?

[MasonFace]

Yes, I can do that. I'm usually free in the evenings around 9:00pm Central Time (CST).

[DigitalMonk]

"I love it when a plan comes together" -- Hannibal

[MasonFace]

I found the post that I'd been looking for, describing how I was attempting to upscale the NPC flats.

The idea was to use the AI upscaled NPC flats where it did okay on the bodies but butchered the faces, then use AI upscaled NPC portraits that the algorithm did pretty well and superimpose the two.



The result was about 4x higher resolution than the vanilla sprite and it preserved the original art style. But, it was simply too time consuming for me to do on every NPC, so I ended up not pursuing it any further.

[King of Worms]

My input on this is, that it would be cool to concentrate the focus on animated NPCs...
The static ones are already really well done compared to the animated ones.
My opinion