AI Upscaled Textures

[MrFlibble]

Ive linked this post to him, will take a while, because new posts need to be checked by admins...
PS: Awesome results in the screens!!!

Thanks!

Hello i'm the dev of the ESrganResizer GUI.

Hello, and welcome to the forums! ^_^

I just threw together a small comparison with the same sprite from DF scaled up using one, two and three passes:
https://imgur.com/a/foJnH31
(it also seems that three xBRZ passes are actually better than one xBR plus two xBRZ passes)

Duh, I just realised that I forgot to sharpen the original image before applying two and three passes; that's why it came out blurry.

But that should be less relevant now that with the new models we can get good results without resorting to the multipass method.

Today I further tested cartoonpainted_80000 and mymanga109_250000 interpolations with ESRGAN at alpha 0.8 (see above). Both have their strengths and weaknesses. cartoonpainted seems to be most suited for smoothing straight lines at any angles, check these two results with big letters (scaled down to 640x480 for correct aspect ratio):
https://imgur.com/a/Doov1Vf

On the other hand, mymanga109 came out sharper and more accurate on Blake's face while cartoonpainted gave him that rad duckface look cartoonpainted is also prone to producing colour banding, something I didn't notice with other models so far.

I felt that mymanga109 gave better results with screenshots from Command & Conquer as shown here:
https://imgur.com/a/YUubwIk

[King of Worms]

Hi Satsuki, Ive re-Installed, with the same results:

When I set ESRganResizer.exe to "run as admin" I get this msg

Untitled-2.jpg (75.8 KiB) Viewed 3102 times

The program does not even start, so I cant see any command line messages.

I found strange thing, I use waifu cafee as well, just older version and it works on my GPU (gets hot)
But I started the waifu from your installation and it says:

2.jpg (73.45 KiB) Viewed 3102 times

Is the line in HowTo.Txt
"pip3 install http://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu90/to ... _amd64.whl"
reffering to installation of CUDA?

I processed that line succesfuly (as well all other things stated in that file)
So Do I need to install CUDA from some other source or is this all I need to do to have CUDA up and running?

[MasonFace]

@KoW: When I gave you the link to install CUDA, I think I may have given you the link for the Windows 10 version.

Uninstall CUDA and try this one instead: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downl ... e=exelocal

@MrFlibble:

I felt that mymanga109 gave better results with screenshots from Command & Conquer

Looks great!

[King of Worms]

Yeah, but Ive downloaded win7 x64 file...
Also, it seems CUDA is installed in the process of setting up the program pre-requisities
I will wait for a reply from tha man... other programs using CUDA work so...

Also, this is CUDA 10 link, not sure its ok for gtx970

Thanks anyway

[satsuki_yatoshi]

I don't have win7 anymore so i can't test.
Strange the exe doesn't even launch.
Could you try to install the vb6 runtimes ?
(I'll send you a link if needed)

[MrFlibble]

In the meantime I ran a brief test with the other models but wasn't really happy with any of them. Then I ran a test sprite sheet of Dagerfall monsters through cartoonpainted, with the result vastly superior to my previous attempt:

Spoiler!

The outlines of the figures are much smoother now (check out the seducer's leg for example) and the images are bit sharper, and also you can actually make out more details, including streaks of hair (seducer), facial features (Redguard civilian, Lich), the central part of the leaves on the Spriggan etc. I used the same Kuwahara-Nagao technique as above to get the alpha channel mask (that is, make a copy of the image, apply KN blur at 2 pixel radius without detail protection, then convert to the original 8-bit palette of the image, select the background part and paste over the upscaled result).

[MasonFace]

Wow! I'm particularly impressed with the civilian and seducer, and the harpy's face.

I started trying to upscale the civilians, but haven't been satisfied with the results. I think this method looks very promising! If I can recreate these results, I may not even bother compositing with Gigapixel AI.

What program are you using to do the Kuwahara-Nagao filter? I don't recall seeing it in Gimp 2.10.

[King of Worms]

I don't have win7 anymore so i can't test.
Strange the exe doesn't even launch.
Could you try to install the vb6 runtimes ?
(I'll send you a link if needed)

Ive found just the same file which was included in the "runtime" folder of the ESRgan package its called "vbrun60sp6" and is 1mb in size.
The install is so fast I cant see anything, just a tab appears for a split of the second...

I hope someone with win7 can actually test this

[MrFlibble]

What program are you using to do the Kuwahara-Nagao filter? I don't recall seeing it in Gimp 2.10.

I use mtPaint for both the KN blur and converting images to indexed palettes. Just don't forget to select no dithering and to set the colour space to RGB in the options of the convert to indexed menu. I also use it to convert the custom sprite sheets to indexed palettes.

BTW, here's the test sprite sheet I have used for the above results, already with the xBRZ pass (and also the 8-bit original too), in case you need it for testing purposes:
https://imgur.com/a/y3Kn5oF

The install is so fast I cant see anything, just a tab appears for a split of the second...

IIRC you can check what VBRuntime libraries are installed in the installed programmes menu (or whatever that's called).

[satsuki_yatoshi]

Ive found just the same file which was included in the "runtime" folder of the ESRgan package its called "vbrun60sp6" and is 1mb in size.
The install is so fast I cant see anything, just a tab appears for a split of the second...

That's the normal way it's installing.
I'll send you a "debug" exe asap with "test" messages so you can tell me after witch message it's bugs and i can debug ^^