2K Stock Texture Upscales

[ShikuTeshi 1,299]

As the title says. I've upscaled the Halo's textures to 2K via Artificial Intelligence from a program known as Gigapixel by Topaz Labs. The only things done right now are the Vehicle and Weapon textures. I might do skies next then terrain. We'll see how lazy I'm feeling.

I've tried to do 4K but there's too many limitations with Halo to comfortably do so. Even if I do the skies and terrain afterwards, I may have to downscale to 1K depending on the size it takes up.

 

For now, here's some download links.
Uncompressed 8x Upscaled Vehicle PNG's

Uncompressed 8x Upscaled Weapon PNG's

Uncompressed 2K Resized Weapon and Vehicle PNG's

2K Compressed & Compiled Texture Tags (Vehicles & Weapons)

 

And an Imgur link with some comparison screenshots. Missing some pelicans and wraiths in there but whatever. If this has your attention then you should download it to take a look for yourself.

[Takka 13,376]

You've done many of us a great service, sir. Outstanding!

[MrChromed 59]

Really nice results indeed. I hope you used some of the uncompressed textures available using MEK's TexSource.

[ShikuTeshi 1,299]

They become too large if I don't compress them. They'll quickly overcome the 4GB limit of Halo and be rendered useless. At this size, I simply don't have a choice but to compress them. Quality difference is minimal regardless. Slightly blurrier if you really try to look for it. Without a side by side comparison, I don't think you'd ever notice.

[DSalimander 213]

I think he means extracting the original TIFF data out of the tags and starting the process with that [wherever Gearbox failed to provide the actual TIFF file in HEK]. The concept is that when you compile a Halo bitmap, the tag itself stores a copy of the original unmodified TIFF data. Look into MEK for more info [the thread on Halomaps has more information]. While on the subject of MEK, you could also prune out said TIFF data in the near-final tags, reducing the size just enough to possibly bump the bitmap up to the next higher resolution or superior bitmap compression type. There's a lot of noodling that can be done with this type of stuff for the best possible outcome.

 

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Halo_Bitmap_Optimizer_&_Converter:
You all know what this is. BUT you should know that I wrote accelerator modules in c, but they are distributed as source files that need to be compiled into binaries when you install the mek. If you dont have a certain version of the visual c++ compiler installed(depends on the version of python you're running) then it will default to the slow python functions. Follow these instructions to install the correct compiler if you're interested in getting that massive speed up(more than 100x faster)https://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/12/21/compiling-python-extensions-on-windows/. After the compiler is installed, just run the upgrade.py script.

Halo_TeXource:
Capable of ripping the uncompressed source textures from a directory of tags to tga files.

Edit- Lmao at the description Moses made for the optimizer and converter. Unfortunately MEK doesn't have the best documentation.

Edited August 15, 2019 by DSalimander

[Pfhunkie 3,544]

If we could get a map pack with the refined assets and this, that would be great.

[Sunstriker7 698]

7 hours ago, Pfhunkie said:

If we could get a map pack with the refined assets and this, that would be great.

At the very bottom of this thread he says:

 

Quote

Once they have been processed, they will be uploaded to the OpenCarange FTP server for anyone to download. https://opencarnage.net/misc/upscale/

 

I'm sure once a large number of the most impressive upscales have been done they'll be archived as one texture pack. Very cool start though.

[ShikuTeshi 1,299]

Since the time of Gigapixel a bunch of AI projects have started taking open source flights. Many of which show very promising results due to being able to train your own models.
One of which is ESRGAN which has become very popular in upscaling content due to having the ability to train your own model. It's been around for awhile but only recently have I taken a look at it now that users have had a lot of time with it.
I'm utilizing ESRGAN vis Cupscale. And specifically for this project I've used a model from n00mkrad (nmkd) the developer of Cupscale for these textures. Specifically Sourcetex which was trained on game texture data. That and a bunch of other models they've trained can be found here.

Now I'm not saying I'm going to do this project all over again with the new AI. At least not for Custom Edition when I'm hoping we'll be getting proper MCC modding tools. And with AI upscaling game textures becoming pretty popular someone else probably has the same idea. Though hopefully they use this instead of Gigapixel since even the latest version of it today can't do anything but life shots correctly. If not then I guess I'll do it.
As for examples. There were two versions of Sourcetex that showed the most promise.

Sourcetex-v2 Standard (There are 3 other variants of this called Smooth, Smoother, and Smoothest which literally appears to smooth out the image resulting in less details.)

 

Sourcetex-DXT-JPG-Smooth for DXT and JPG images containing compression artifacts

 

Both seem to have their pro's and con's. Both were also done without utilizing the decomposition method I used for Gigapixel to mitigate/remove color bleeding/shifting and halo'ing because such method seems to hurt in this case.
And of course both did a MUCH better job that Gigapixel.

Sorry Tucker. Seems like we won't be utilizing that program anymore.