Darkcrafter wrote:I don't seem to like this neural upscale project a much, the aligns are bend up a lot since it's not sufficient just to place textures in "HIRES" folder and call it a day. To be completely fine, the project pk3 file must contain a special "TEXTURES" lump that would explain the engine what dimensions each particular texture has, what scale and offset they must be.
They definitely are doing an amazing job there but I'm a perfectionist (I know it's disease of some sort) and I don't like the way their scaler treats "noisy" areas like noise and blurs it out into a flat washed out surface that is being surrounded by scattered diagonal splashes. Also the upscaler adds some unwanted color noise that doesn't work that great if I would prefer to play with palette shader engaged without texture filtering at all.
Here is the comparison between Nearest Neighbor and AI performed with SUPPORT3 texture:
https://imgur.com/7tj75le
So to me this pack is more of a draft quality rather than production ready and it's yet just 2x, as soons as it gets at least 4x it will gain even more artifacts and flubyness, so relying on just AI here isn't the best way of handling this problem, I believe it could take years of work to recreate it faithfully by just redrawing them pixel by pixel in photoshop or gimp. So we have to choose between premium quality work (redrawing by hand that could take years) or imperfect redrawing by combing tricks and tools. GIMP can easily pick up an amazing plug-in that suits upscaling some granular textures without losing the grain - Texture Synthesizer, it's free and I found a working 32 and 64 bit compiled windows versions that supports cpu multi-threading, hope it's fine I post it here because it's getting hard to find one:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BaCnX ... 4mjJ2ykilm
Also, here is lost demo version of SmartEdge algorithm developed at MSU:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JbY-9 ... LEtWAq9Ynq
If you're on Windows 7 or 10 turn on Windows XP compatibilty and give it administrator rights before launching. Choose bilinear as a scaling algo, press X2 button, turn every setting to 0 except "fractal substitution" and see what this thing does to pixel art.
https://imgur.com/a/fR7zE57
This was very helpful in the long-run. I have found an alternative solution; simply bringing the "Hires" folder to the source graphics that's being upscaled. My latest test on Neural Smooth Doom was a success, many sprites are rendered properly with "add" and I've done the same with the Switches in SmoothTextures.
Now, with the Neural Upscale;
I'm gonna need to basically port the vanilla texture data to the Neural 2x pk3, I need to know Filter, I've asked everywhere and no answers.
The idea is to take the TEXTURES and PATCHES from each Vanilla game; delete the shared stuff from 2,Pluto,TNT, and place them all in a source filter folder; The engine will have it's proper alignments and the Hires textures will display correctly.
Alternatively, this mod could benefit from filter if Doom 2 on-wards get's worked on.
A pretty good update this is mostly Switch-based; Added PIPE in it's entirety, fixed all sets of switches (some may have to be remade), GRAY and GRAY1 have been corrected.
I also love the fact that this shader stacks so nicely, so Brightmaps and glows work seamlessly with it.
Load this up on SIGIL to see all effects working in harmony.