Doom Neural Upscale 2X [v 1.0]

[KaZudra]

6 hours ago, Turin Turambar said:

Define 'may have' ...

Okay, you got me.

I'll be uploading an upscaled version of the now current build of Smooth Doom before the day's over with.

Consider this a teaser.

 

 

EDIT:

Here you go

Only things that were changed from the Base 4-14-20 Build;

Added Smooth Projectiles.

Additional bugfix (Green blood for Gibs2 fix).

Restored HeadCandles.

Mugshots... I just put a BRZ placeholder in until I can find a way that isn't making wildly inconsistent results.

Edited April 15, 2020 by KaZudra : Delivery

[Turin Turambar]

That's cool. Does it include upscaled everything? (items, weapons) or only enemies?

 

edit:

 

I have an error

 

 

[JPL]

7 hours ago, Turin Turambar said:

That's cool. Does it include upscaled everything? (items, weapons) or only enemies? 

 

edit:

 

I have an error

 

 

 

I saw this too and was able to correct it by editing the file given in the error (deco/projectiles.txt), to add a "Spawn" label to the state above the given line (29).

[Turin Turambar]

I did a few captures

 

-https://i.imgur.com/B7kSpJ7.png

-https://i.imgur.com/32x916x.png

-https://i.imgur.com/qk9OFt9.png

-https://i.imgur.com/XkAYTsp.png

-https://i.imgur.com/pe5X5Vp.png

-https://i.imgur.com/dpCQl5d.png

-https://i.imgur.com/qBYhvA5.png

-https://i.imgur.com/znI8csH.png

 

It's a good 1.0 version, only some polish need to be done in a few places, like the Caco.

[Gifty]

@KaZudra WOW, I am super impressed by that. I think a lot of us assumed it couldn't be done. After I've pulled the majority of Smooth Doom's animations up to a higher standard of quality, so we have a stronger "base" to work with, I would love to seriously pursue an upscaling project like this in earnest. 

[Get Phobo]

This looks great. It seems Gigapixel has been vastly improved since version 4.0 from a year ago which was still quite ugly.

[KaZudra]

@Gifty Thanks for the Kudos, been a fan of Smooth Doom and Dead Marine so this means alot.

 

ALSO, you need to tell me which monsters aren't going through the second pass-through before I start working on 2.0 proper! 

 

@Get Phobo I chose it because it allowed me to replicate the Neural Results (with a good amount of photoshop) as close as possible.

 

I started with Photoshop and... I knew it would take forever to replicate Smooth Doom with these assets, so I got the Idea of replicating the upscale... but I was limited to 4x at most, I can and will make the Sprites look better (I got lazy with clean-up, paletted PNG'd everything removing artifacts, I also sourced pre-made BRZ's instead of making my own and did most at 2x instead of the Downscale method until I redid the weapons). So the new method as Follows;

Make 4x Upscales with XBRZ and Gigapixel

Align them in PhotoShop

Magic select the transparent on the BRZ copy (no anti-aliasing), then remove it on the Gigapixel layer.

Set the Gigapixel layer at Luminosity @ 50% Opacity

Then Merge and Downscale with Nearest Neighbor.

 

This'll yield cleaner results that'll look far superior without the need to Palette PNG them for clean-up.

[Gifty]

@KaZudra Not to sound crazy, but I'd like to try to redo all of them. The monster animations are by far the most ancient part of the mod, so they need the most love. If the Smooth Upscale is something you have plans to maintain or do updates for, I can give you a heads-up whenever a second pass for a monster is completed! Would also gladly take this into PMs if it's something you want to talk about/plan in more detail.

 

Maybe I should get a hold of this upscaling software myself, that might also open up some doors.

[KaZudra]

@Gifty That does sound crazy, but the good kinda crazy.

I plan on keeping up with it, but If you're essentially going to re-do everything, I might as well wait it out before I make the superior batch...and brightmaps.

To be honest, Monster Upscaling can be fun but mostly tedious... and then you have Archvile, 256 frames of torture.

[r6d2]

On 4/25/2020 at 2:39 PM, KaZudra said:

To be honest, Monster Upscaling can be fun but mostly tedious... and then you have Archvile, 256 frames of torture.

 

Have you thought of any means of automating the process? This project seems to have achieved part of this goal:

 

[Gifty]

The wadsnip stuff looks pretty decent; does anyone have a lead on how easy the process is/how much of the work it automates? If some of the heavy lifting is taken out of the upscaling process, that might bode really well for a more efficient cleanup project.

[r6d2]

39 minutes ago, Gifty said:

The wadsnip stuff looks pretty decent; does anyone have a lead on how easy the process is/how much of the work it automates? If some of the heavy lifting is taken out of the upscaling process, that might bode really well for a more efficient cleanup project.

 

AFAIK it pretty much does all the hard work. Quality of the upscaling is limited to waifu2x style, though.

 

Also, not all picture formats can be read by the python libs used. PNGs are the preferred source material. This would also allow the usage of Topaz Gigapixel in the automation.

 

Just curious, @Gifty, is there any reason why not every sprite in SmoothDoom is in PNG format? (I mean, explicitly stored as PNG and not without an extension or inside a lump)?

[Gifty]

I remember fiddling with the format long ago as a band-aid fix for palette issues in Back to Saturn X, but I didn't really know what I was doing. There was no deliberate method or plan to the sprite formatting in Smooth Doom. :P

 

If what you say is true and Wadsnip does the heavy lifting, that's a really good sign. It might actually be feasible to have some kind of organized cleanup effort to polish the neural graphics into something that actually looks artistic.

[r6d2]

9 minutes ago, Gifty said:

If what you say is true and Wadsnip does the heavy lifting, that's a really good sign. It might actually be feasible to have some kind of organized cleanup effort to polish the neural graphics into something that actually looks artistic.

 

You can try downloading and running wadsnip for yourself, although it kind of requires a little bit of setup tinkering if you're not familiar with python under Windows.

 

Otherwise, if you just concentrate on your 2nd pass on making the 1x sprites smoother I think It would be good enough, and we'd have a great base to work on the upscaling. (I already built a waifu2x upscaled pk3 for Beautiful Doom 6.3.2 and looks quite decent.)

[PixelCrunch]

This mod so far is REALLY good. But I have one recommendation...

 

Have you tried upscaling 3x, 4x, or maybe even 6x? Experiment! Get creative with your AI scaling and interpolation! No limits! Go 2 It!

[Scuba Steve]

There's little point in upscaling beyond 2x. I've played some that attempt this, and they're just too damn ugly.  Double resolution seems to be the sweet spot between generating decent information with the neural networks, and still retaining the aesthetic of the original sprite.

 

And, actually, every sprite in this project was originally upscaled to 8x, and downsampled to 2x.

[KaZudra]

The core problem with up-scaling is that you really can't automate it; sometimes results at 4x are terrible but the 2x ones are just right, occasionally there's a case where I fed it the 64-styled rocket box and it just changed the sprite entirely. other cases are things like script animation where the result is a million times better if you re-do the animation with the hi-res assets rather than up-scaling the finished version frame-by-frame.

 

And then, sometimes... SOMETIMES you get a case of Arachnotron, where it's better off to just edit a Spider Mastermind into one rather than upscaling.

[DooMknight]

On 10/12/2019 at 10:56 PM, MrFlibble said:

hey mates, good work with the SS soldier facelift! Now he's happy and hopeful

[KollegeMostrich]

Hey :-) this is really awesome! I’m a member of the QuestZDoom team (a VR Port of ZDOOM for the Oculus Quest VR Headset) and it runs fine. I would like to ask you if you can put this Mod on another mirror server with the functionality of direct downloading/ direct access to the file. We want to put this in our auto downloader. The release of QuestZDoom is soon.
 

if it is allowed, I could upload the mod to Moddb (or you can do it yourself) - of course with all credits for this awesome mod. The credits for the developers of this mod would of course also be visible in our auto downloader. I would be very happy to receive a quick reply

 

[Amph]

Spoiler

 

is this included in 4.3.3

 

some bug maybe already spotted by other, pistol don't show, probably other weapons too

 

ok i tried it again i can confirm, this is only for the pistol, i can't see the pistol, it appear only when i use it

Edited May 12, 2020 by Amph

[Amph]

ok i tried again and even the machinegun is not showing, so i guess it with weapon that use the first type of bullet

[Rrraaghh]

On 5/13/2020 at 4:27 PM, Amph said:

ok i tried again and even the machinegun is not showing, so i guess it with weapon that use the first type of bullet

 

Change 'weapons' to uppercase 'WEAPONS' in SmoothDoom_HiRes.pk3\SPRITES\ .

[Amph]

On 5/21/2020 at 6:46 PM, Rrraaghh said:

 

Change 'weapons' to uppercase 'WEAPONS' in SmoothDoom_HiRes.pk3\SPRITES\ .

 

i can't find smoothdoom_hires.pk3

[Gifty]

Hate to keep necomancing this thread, but I've been playing around lately with retouching the upscaled textures (which has always been an acknowledged step of the process, but as far as I know has never been attempted) to bring back the handmade quality of the originals. It's definitely a doable and not-very-difficult task, it's just a huge amount of grunt work. I'm not even that great of an artist, but I've gotten a lot more confident with texturing lately so I might work on this further. Normals/specmaps would also be a simple task after touching these things up.

 

(1) original... (2) raw upscaled... and (3) touchup...

 

 

To anyone who's more savvy with digital art: is there any generally-acknowledged way of reducing mosquito noise or generally "crispifying" things to tighten up gradients and make them less muddy? The main beef with the upscaled material right now is it's very glooby and noisy. 

Edited September 5, 2020 by Gifty

[elend]

Well, did you try some form of sharpening yet? Adaptive sharpening or maybe contrast sharpening could work well to get rid of the "muddyness" of the image. Also, what about adding some slight and even noise at the end?

[Gifty]

Using noise reduction in the lighten/darken only modes helps a lot, it can essentially act as a high/lowpass filter to reduce unsightly speckling only in certain ranges. Highlighting all the edges with multiply and screen layers can add better definition to the shapes and lighting information. I almost wonder if using some kind of procedural program like Substance Designer to generate clean, un-noisy AO patterns for bricks/tiles etc. wouldn't be better.

 

EDIT: Another wip touchup. Still not 100% satisfied but I think I'm starting to pick up a workflow for this.

 

DOUBLE EDIT: The demon face upscales and cleans up really well. Took a little artistic license on the blood stream just to see how it would look.

 

Edited September 6, 2020 by Gifty

[elend]

That looks neat and I like it. Strange how the demon face bricks look so different from the upper ones. I'd make a master brick texture and then use it for all the other variants (demon face, bloody lower edge, etc.)

[Gifty]

Yeah, I actually do have them mostly in a big master file, I just ended up tweaking the green bricks before starting on that gargoyle. Probably went a little heavy on the emboss anyway, I should tone it down some. :P

[Soundblock]

Can I just say in here that I think hidfan's upscale pack should be included as a "high-res" option in Bethesda's Unity wrapper for Doom, that they now seem somewhat dedicated to? No idea of the technical/legal feasability of such though.

[Gifty]

3 hours ago, Soundblock said:

Can I just say in here that I think hidfan's upscale pack should be included as a "high-res" option in Bethesda's Unity wrapper for Doom, that they now seem somewhat dedicated to? No idea of the technical/legal feasability of such though.

I was thinking exactly the same thing after the Unity wrapper made it to PC. I think a semi-officialized X2 pack with proper artistic cleanup would be fantastic.

 

I tried cleaning up the Satyr upscale, blending in the original source photo and a cleaner noise base for the metal section. If it looks strange it's because I didn't re-add all the green. Pretty pleased with it.

 

before/after with the '93 original: