[MOD] Remastered Friends and Foes

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carademono
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Villagers

Post by carademono »

Ok, all set and uploaded to the Nexus. Enjoy your vanilla-faced guards! Thank you to Jarlyjarljarl for the useful feedback.
Spoiler!
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carademono
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Villagers

Post by carademono »

Putting the finishing touches on Remastered Classes, which hopefully I'll have released on the Nexus later today. In the meantime, here are some preview screenshots:
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carademono
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Friends and Foes

Post by carademono »

Remastered Classes is released! All human adventurers and bandits now have faces, and I've added two Redguards into the mix. I invite you all to try it out here: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/190.

If you spot a sprite that could use some additional polishing, please take a screenshot and send it my way!

Remastered Monsters coming up in a few days...

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carademono
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Friends and Foes

Post by carademono »

A preview of Remastered Monsters:

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carademono
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Friends and Foes

Post by carademono »

Remastered Monsters is now released! Go grab it over on the Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/190

Now all three sprite overhauls in the Remastered Friends and Foes series have been released. I'm not done with these though, by a long shot. Next up is an update for Remastered Classes, which will significantly improve hooded NPCs and generally fix perspective issues with faces. In the meantime, I really urge the DF Unity community to download the mods and help me make them better by reporting any sprites that still look terrible :D

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King of Worms
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Friends and Foes

Post by King of Worms »

Its such a shame you fit these subpar upscales with such a nice faces, I just cant get over it and see it as a missed opportunity, oh welll

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MrFlibble
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Friends and Foes

Post by MrFlibble »

King of Worms wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 9:08 am these subpar upscales
I feel ya. xBRZ wasn't really created to upscale this kind of sprites, it's for clean, pixel art console style images and not pre-rendered sprites with baked-in shading like Mark Jones' work.

It's probably good for the mod author's skills though, albeit I should point out that some of the hooded and helmeted faces seem a bit "off", like here the woman's head looks way too much forward-placed compared to what the shape of her hood might suggest as to the position of her head.

Generally though, I'd suppose it would be ideal to recruit a 3D/sprite artist who could just remake the sprites in the same way as sebabdukeboss20 did for Demon Throne. It might sound like enormous work, and upscales (AI or not) could seem an easier way to do more or less the same job, but trust me, it's a better choice in the long run -- assuming that an artist of this calibre indeed shows up and is willing to help, and has enough time to do the work.

But I digress.

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carademono
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Friends and Foes

Post by carademono »

New release!

v3.5: Major update with a thousand changes. I went through every frame in all three mods fixing mistakes and adding polish. Head placement and eyelines have been fixed (this is what MrFibble is referring to above -- big thanks to Kotykos, ACNAero, and Ralzar for helping me with this!). Shadows are now aligned. Adventurers and some monsters face the player on approach. I paid special attention to walking and attack animations -- these are now as smooth as the source material allows. Many more monsters now have faces and/or eyes. Vampires look cool as hell.

I'd rather not litter a release post with bickering between mod authors, so I'll put my response to KoW's post above in spoilers.
Spoiler!
So far, KoW, you've called my work "just awful," "so bad," and "subpar." I have five-year-old twins and therefore have had to develop a lot of patience, but it's still wearing pretty thin with you. Established modders should be supportive of new modders -- they shouldn't relentlessly insult their efforts.

Anyway, as I've repeatedly clarified, my sprites are not simply the product of the XBR filter. I created a base layer using the XBR, on which I overlayed AI upscaled layers. The XBR base layer gives my sprites their strong contours, sharpens detail, and in particular gives the sprites an excellent illusion of depth. More generally, the base layer keeps the sprites from looking like a blurry mess *ahem*. Those "nice" faces you admired also have an XBR base layer! It's all the same process.

Why don't we look at some comparison shots?

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Yes, D.R.E.A.M. achieves smoother color gradients, but at the cost of washing out all the detail and flattening any sense of depth. You might also try using a smoothing filter on your alpha layers so their edges don't look so jagged.

Note also the Redguard fighter in the background. Right now I have two Redguard adventurers, but in a future release I'll have Redguard variants for all the classes.

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I could make my sprites look like D.R.E.A.M.'s by running them through a Gaussian Blur filter.

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I've got to agree with you here, your technique achieves smoother color gradients than mine. But... as a consequences, your orc looks like it's made of plastic. I spend a lot of time with five-year-olds; I can recognize a Playmobil when I see one.

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Again, D.R.E.A.M.'s color gradients are certainly smoother, but yikes.

Let's take a look at some villagers.

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I rather like a lot of your Redguard sprites, by the way... but not this one.

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KoW, I'm happy to have a friendly sprite competition with you, because the real winners of that would be the DF Unity community. But right now you are WAY behind.

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Cliffworms
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Friends and Foes

Post by Cliffworms »

Those look great, carademono!

It's been fascinating to see your project evolve and those sprites are truly beautiful.
Redguard enemies are a great addition to give some Hammerfell back in the Iliac Bay.

I have yet to try a playthrough as I'm enjoying modding the game a lot, but I'll be keeping a close eye on this. :)

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King of Worms
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Re: [MOD] Remastered Friends and Foes

Post by King of Worms »

Hi, sry if it came across like that, not intended. I commented only on the technical aspect of the used up-scaling algo, and Im quite sure Ive dropped also some positive notes, not only negative. Good luck with the project and have fun with it :)

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