A little bit of my own work on Vanilla HD

RedKing

RedKing

Hopeless Creature
Gender
Male
Guildcard
42000468
Guildcard 2
42073641
So, I've been spending some time on-and-off doing both upscales and manual fixes and tweaks to the game's textures.

So far, I've done work on all the player character classes, and all of the mags, I'm in the process of doing the weapons now, which is going to be an entire project in itself.

My method as of late has been to create a 4x upscale using 2~3 different AI models, and then blending together the best bits of all their results.
The main two models getting the spotlight however are HDCube for it's fantastic and clean line and curve preservation and 4xUltraSharp for it's great work on fine detail and natural noise.

But there are some textures where an AI upscale just does not do it! Enter LOGiN
I spent over an hour looking for the source material behind this stupid weapon, and eventually found the "box art" they used as a limited collector's mousemat in an eBay listing!
I then ended up having to guesswork recreate a vague approximation of a lot of the japanese text, because so much of it is indecipherable levels of blurry
I had to recreate the LOGiN logo from several different edition's covers and blended the RAmarl into the front of it like in the original, added in a PSOBB logo PNG to match the original size, and then guess text from just 2 pixel tall squares...

But after all that pain and suffering, this is the end result, a stunning before and after that is night and day:
psoMagazineBefore.pngpsoMagazineAfter.png

There will be much more to come as my slow progress continues, but I felt like this one needed to be shared after too much time spent on a single texture file.
 
I enjoyed going down the rabbit hole with you on this one, combining ChatGPT and Google queries to try and discover whether this was a real magazine or not and if we could find the real cover image or associated composite resources. Holy sh*z it was balls-insane
 
I'm back with another report of a completed item that had me scared: FTD!

Another thing I had to do some heavy manual work on because an upscale was just simply nevergoing to cut it. I had to remake the magic circle textures from scratch, as that would have come out just obscenely ugly, and now, instead, I think it's obscenely pretty!!
A big thanks also to Volos for helping me with a script to generate an automated set of commands to post-process all the files with the correct mips levels and formatting to not crash the game - I use GIMP for my editing and it's a little stiff on what it does with exporting sometimes.
Enjoy the screenie.

EDIT: Also, have a Greenill Genpei for the road!

FTD.PNG
FTD's magic ring texture remade entirely from scratch, serving as a lovely backdrop for the shield itself made with two editor-fade-blended AI upscale models and a touch of manual fix-up.
GenpeiGrn.jpg
Genpei's SectionID badges were all made by me for a previous project, where I recreated all the badges as 3D models and rendered them out.
I took advantage of the fact I had these models to render flat images and use those as potentially infinite resolution images to scale down to whatever I need! I then remade a wood-grain texture with a mix of upscaling, upscale blending in an editor, and AI inpainting to remake the grain from behind the old badge so I could overlay my new one on top.
 
Last edited:
It's been a little while and I've been quiet - but just as a show that this hasn't totally fizzled out, here's a few more textures for you all!

Such a clean outcome and the wood grain texture puts a smile on my face.
Rianov.png
I'm super happy with this one, it looks menacing!
IBazook.png
This took a little tweaking around, but I eventually got it into not a bad state.
HRa.png

Enjoy! I'll be back with more once I have something substantially juicy looking to show off again!
 
I took a break from grinding my face away at upscaling all the weapons and took a moment to look at one of the nastier enemies of the Mine.

1694421157769.png
1694421343035.png
1694421601828.png

EDIT:
As a further update on the overall progress of this mess I chose to get myself in to... 146 item textures are complete and confirmed to be working
I have worked out (with the help of Volos) a method to get MIP mapped textures to not crash.
He wrote me a script which parses the resolution of the original textures and quickly calculates now many MIP layers it has from that.
It then spits out a CSV file with all the texture names gathered from a folder and their respective MIP levels.
A second script he ran then took all the CSV data we need to make a batch list of commands for another program called texconv to use.
texconv gets commanded in rapid succession to nuke the new textures MIP levels back down to the original file's state to prevent crashing the game.
MAGs are all finished, all weapons and shields with MIP Maps should be finished if I haven't missed any random outliers, and a good chunk of weapons including all the basic common types are finished.
I have 258 more folders of weapon textures to finish blending and re-importing, which includes some duplicate folders from the original export.
31 of these are already upscaled and blended, but need to be imported and tested still, and I also have a lot of duplicate "No Data" folders in there.
 
Last edited:
Lol I have no idea if we did that in the most elegant way, probably not. Funny to reflect on the technical process though. But hey it worked!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top