3xBR-noblend Sprite Upscales [Update: It's getting BRUTAL!]

[Max Dickings]

I'm obviously new to all this so please bare with me :x

So, this standalone exe (from what I can tell running it in cmd) converts png sprites to super nice looking sprites?

If that's the case, couldn't I in theory start trying to apply this in my spare time to Brutal Doom?

[Sp00kyFox]

of course you could. the whole brutal doom pack with all its files just looks super confusing.
so this gotta be a mess to do this. but feel free to try. I suggest you use the batch I posted.

[Max Dickings]

Whoa, I think I did it!!

- Old original file, zoomed in


- Unaltered new file



And I managed to apply it to the entire Fatality folder! Although me thinks I should wait a week for V19 to come out then convert that one instead...




e/
Ahhhhh spoke too soon. It doesn't work in-game. I deleted the orignals and replaced them with the ones I converted, and they don't display in game. Aww

[Sp00kyFox]

yeah it doesn't work this way. you need the original files for the meta informations. just throw your upscaled sprites in a folder called "hires" (subdirectories are possible) inside of a pk3 file and load this after the wad/pk3 with the original unscaled sprites.

[Enjay]

This is pretty cool. I think it works particularly well in Strife because the resizing method suits the slightly cartoony nature of the Strife graphics.

Are there any other command line options for the tool other than infile/outfile? The reason I ask is that I would like to stop it optimising images to paletted ones. I have a couple of examples where it makes some mistakes and wrongly identifies certain pixels as background areas. As far as I can tell, the tool doesn't reduce images with more than 256 colours to a paletted PNG so I have got around the problem by pasting a small square with loads of unique colours on to the image to ensure that it has more than 256 colours. This works but it's clumsy and time consuming.

[pantera]

wow, seems impressive... how i can download it? links are broken

[Sp00kyFox]

Are there any other command line options for the tool other than infile/outfile? The reason I ask is that I would like to stop it optimising images to paletted ones. I have a couple of examples where it makes some mistakes and wrongly identifies certain pixels as background areas.

no not to my knowledge, the usage is pretty basic. but I don't quite understand your problem though. what's the issue with if the result file is a paletted one? use a graphic tool like xnview and resave all the images to truecolor pngs or whatever. and what do you mean by background areas, transperancy? since this xBR variant doesn't blend colors it also keeps the transperancy intact. the only problem is, if the transperancy color itself is too similar to the edge of the sprite which leads to wrong interpolation decisions. thats why I suggested my batch file, which substitutes the transperancy color to a more suitable one.
for the different iwads I used the following colors (based on what colors are already in the specific palette):

Code: Select all

DOOM
cyan

HERETIC & HEXEN
"rgb(255,0,128)"

STRIFE
magenta

wow, seems impressive... how i can download it? links are broken

hmm, no? checked all 5 download links, there are still online.

[DoomRater]

Any idea if this filter could be added to ZDoom? I'd love it if the engine did all the heavy lifting for me. Might even get me to use such a filter.

[Enjay]

I don't quite understand your problem though. what's the issue with if the result file is a paletted one?

I've had two problems actually (which may just be different manifestations of the same problem for all I know).

Problem 1: a true colour PNG image (of a HUD weapon) was run through the upscaler. The resulting image was paletted and all the areas that should have been transparent were dark grey and non transparent. However, a small area about 16 pixels wide and the shape of a square with the top right corner missing in the middle of the weapon was set to be transparent. Pasting a small 32x32 graphic with lots of colours onto the transparent area of the source image prevented the graphic being paletised and the resulting upscaled image had correct transparency.

I also had another image (a powrup pickup) where all of the transparency from the original image became set to a dark grey colour. Again, changing the image to have too many colours to be paletised allowed transparency to be set correctly.

Problem2: Another HUD weapon was also run through the upscaler. This particular weapon has a number of frames. Some have a nice graduated flash on them others do not. In the graphics without a flash, the images became paletised and a number of pixels around the end of the weapon became set to transparent. These made the weapon look ragged at the end. The upscaler did not paletise the ones with the flash and it was this weapon that allowed me to discover the work-around. Sure enough, using my 32x32 colour-paste workaround allowed the images to convert properly.


In both of the above cases, I was just using the upscaler exe without any additional tools or batch files.
3xBRLV4 infile.png outfile.png

It can't be a case that partial transparency in the original image (or similar) was causing the problem because there was no partial transparency (due to the way I made the images, there shouldn't have been). However, I have run true colour images with partial transparency through the upscaler and they worked just fine.

I'm not that bothered. The images were just a test and I found a workaround. It was just that if there was a command line switch to prevent paletising (which seems to be the root of the problem), I would have used it to prevent me having to spot glitched graphics and then use the workaround.

Also, just as a side point, personally I'd prefer the resulting images to be true colour. It would make it easier for me to do some "post production" work on them.

[Sp00kyFox]

my guess would be that the problem is caused by transparent pixels with different colors. so if your sprite has too few colors (<= 256) the executable palettises it and by that only considers one of the transparency colors, since this format doesn't allow more than one entry set to transparent. solution would be to set every transparent pixel to the same color, which is exactly what I did in my batch script. you need the freeware tool graphicsmagick (gm) though.
just make sure to use a color which isn't used by or similar to any nontransparent pixels. see me color suggestions from the last post.

if this doesn't help at all, you could always contact the author of the scaler: hyllian. he's active at the retroarch, bsnes and neogaf forums.

[Max Dickings]

So with v19 released, I upsized all the monster sprites and fatality sprites.

Is this a noticeable difference? Worthy of uploading? Etc.

http://imgur.com/JcnZpYU,X7PRh5A,0w9JVTt,AHLP9kO

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[doomfiend]

Can I please have that hud?

[Blox]

Maybe it would look better if you didn't botch it up with hqnx afterwards? (Look at how blurry the ground is.)

[Sinael]

Why dont simply apply the filter to textures too? I'd like to see how that would look.

[Enjay]

Why dont simply apply the filter to textures too? I'd like to see how that would look.

Simply, because you can't.

The textures don't exist as graphics. Patches that are used inside the textures do but they have different names to the textures. So you'd have to either redefine all the textures individually to be hi-res after filtering the patches or youd have to recreate the textures as graphics, filter them and use the hi-res replacement method.