Re: AI Upscaled Textures
Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:46 pm
A large part of the problem I've been having with the sprite edges I thought was due to the bilinear filtering smoothing the edges in a way I didn't expect. I thought it had something to do with the suggestion that Interkarma made to you in the thread I referenced above, but I don't think that's the issue after all. Interestingly enough, the edge padding (or dilation) appears to be working now without any required work on the artists's behalf - the RGB values at the alpha edge are extended outwards so the bilinear filter has surrounding pixels to sample without contaminating the results. Not sure if this "fix" was a Unity update or if Interkarma updated his billboard shader but it seems to work fine without any effort on the artist's part.
See attached picture below with the alpha cutoff set to 0 so that all RGB values are displayed (no transparency).
And with the alpha cutoff set to the default of "0.5"
A lot of my problem was actually that I had feathered edges. Once I set the alpha to have a hard falloff, it works pretty good.
So my remaining problem is this:
Using your xBR upscales as a base, I downscale them from 8x vanilla resolution to 4x vanilla resolution, I do get smooth silhouettes but the xBR interprets some diagonal lines as odd melted stair steps which look weird... It does provide a good starting point though, and cleaning those issues is fairly easy to do manually, just time consuming and not possible to batch. For the most part, the results look pretty good, but up close the edges still look a little murky without a lot of careful editing to get clean the silhouette.
For example, look at the top part of the shield. It looks pretty close to round, but the bottom I didn't clean up as well and it still looks wavy.
I had to edit the battle axe pretty heavily to make the shaft straight and the blade curved properly.
See attached picture below with the alpha cutoff set to 0 so that all RGB values are displayed (no transparency).
And with the alpha cutoff set to the default of "0.5"
A lot of my problem was actually that I had feathered edges. Once I set the alpha to have a hard falloff, it works pretty good.
So my remaining problem is this:
Using your xBR upscales as a base, I downscale them from 8x vanilla resolution to 4x vanilla resolution, I do get smooth silhouettes but the xBR interprets some diagonal lines as odd melted stair steps which look weird... It does provide a good starting point though, and cleaning those issues is fairly easy to do manually, just time consuming and not possible to batch. For the most part, the results look pretty good, but up close the edges still look a little murky without a lot of careful editing to get clean the silhouette.
For example, look at the top part of the shield. It looks pretty close to round, but the bottom I didn't clean up as well and it still looks wavy.
I had to edit the battle axe pretty heavily to make the shaft straight and the blade curved properly.