AI Upscaled Textures

[BadLuckBurt]

Thats a good find, seems I was following in Adrinus' footsteps with ImageMagick.

Those commands are the same as I used for that first test with the black background but as he stated, some images just need a manual followup to be cleaned. The main goal would be to try minimize that work.

The description he gives to make new masks is sort of familiar to me. To make bridge models winter compatible I used Adobe Fireworks and a certain blend mode to lift snow from the winter textures in Df using the non-winter versions to delete parts of the image so I could overlay the snow part pn textures that had no snow variant to begin with.

That was a very crude approach that I did by hand because it was only about 10 textures. The result wasnt perfect either but good enough for my level of skill. I was glad when I was done with that though

I will dabble a bit with the steps he mentions in that post and see how it turns out.

Another thing, it might be easier to discuss this directly on Discord to determine the best course of action as long as our timezones are close enough together.

-edit

The command you asked about is ready to be run in a folder, if you create a file that ends in .cmd or .bat , paste the code in there and execute that, it should do the job. There should be a folder named output in the folder you decide to run it in, thats where the processed files will be stored.

You will need to install ImageMagick, I went with version 7. Make sure to let it add itself to your system paths during the installation wizard and to install the legacy convert tool which is also a choice you are given during installation.

If you cant figure it out Ill give clearer instructions when Im on my pc again

[phredreeke]

I'm not sure what particular sprites you need masks for.

[BadLuckBurt]

I'm not sure what particular sprites you need masks for.

Paperdoll items since the transparency is destroyed during upscaling but KoW has pieced together how to restore transparency if all goes well

[MasonFace]

Ole' Phredreeke is baaaaaack!

Let's see if BadLuckBurt's approach will work first. If not, we can export the vanilla sprites and have you generate the upscaled masks if you have time.

I'm really hoping that he can get good results following Adrinus's technique.

[King of Worms]

Well its all complicated.

Adrinus used some algo which made less noise around the edges, I tried the algos he mentioned but I get different results.

So what I will do now is pinpoint the specific pieces of female armor (the one with bugged colors) which have issues and I will upscale them with Lady algo, clean using ImageMagick. This will leave me with ok sprites but bad outlines. I will clean those using the AA plugin. And if needed do the manual input round on them. Than I will just replace the old ones with new ones and hope for the best.

I need to do only some boots, and leg armor. Rest has no issues of THIS kind.

They had the issue that their outline was not cleaned with the AA plugin, but since now I know how to do that, I can do this pass on my own on the sprites which missed it.

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I was hoping for a more thorough aproach, I know it can be made better than it is, but it seems that it would require a lot of work, and I guess the upscaling enthusiasm has diminished (nothing personal to anyone, just observation)

As I have already really hard time putting all the pieces of this 17 000 files puzzle together, last thing I will do is rework all the sprites, eventho I know it can be done better than how it is now.

That would be a thing for someone who wants to show ppl (and prove to himself) what he can do and receive a praises and respect in the community, its more of a thing of honor, reputation and legacy Id say

[BadLuckBurt]

I think you have done more than enough and deserve a break to move on to other things after this last stretch. I'm sure everyone who uses these upscales is very pleased by the efforts everyone has put in over time. I'm not talking about myself as the support I'm giving is rather limited and pretty simple compared to what your collaborative efforts have managed to tackle. Anyone who dares to ask for better quality should just take a stab at it themselves to see how 'easy' stuff like this is.

The only way to get better automated results would be to train the neural network with more reference images which quite frankly sounds like hell on earth to me. PolarStar has been dabbling with a manual repaint which he posted on Discord but he's an artist first and foremost and I don't think any of us are (if I'm wrong, please correct me) so this is best (monumental) effort results from you guys while trying to stay relatively sane imo.

[King of Worms]

Thank u, u are right but the damned paperdoll is not released and nobody used it yet :/
My sanity is long gone thanks to this paperdoll project

[BadLuckBurt]

Thank u, u are right but the damned paperdoll is not released and nobody used it yet :/
My sanity is long gone thanks to this paperdoll project

Yeah, I meant DREAM in general. I guess the best advice I can give you is take this at your own pace and don't force it. As you know I don't use the other upscaled stuff but the paperdoll is too good for me to pass up once it's ready. If the pipeline for the remaining sprites is stable enough I won't mind splitting the workload with you to lighten the load.

[King of Worms]

Thanks a lot,

U are right again, I will just somehow slowly crawl thru this armor issue. Than do the helmets placement etc.

Unfortunately, the pipeline is not stable.. for example it does the 245 armor right and 246 wrong eventho its the same image with 2 pixel difference. I will have to change the algo for these.. I think I will keep the issues for myself for a while, until this part is done. Dont want to frustrate other people more than necessary

[King of Worms]

Just a info someone might find useful. The "cartoonpainted" algo produces less distortion in the black color (which used to be alpha be4 upscale) > so than the ImageMagic color removal works much better, produces cleaner outlines and less artefacts in the sprite > the AA tool in Paint.Net than removes all the artefacts inside the sprite and cleans the outline.

Paint.Net does not have automatization but TinyTask prog can automatizate anything as it logs mouse cursor and keyboard, than replays it in loop and u can speed it up 10times - good idea BadLuckBurt

I think this is so far the best and fastest way to do it.