Texture Upscaling Service

[ShikuTeshi 1,103]

Welcome one and all to the grand Texture Upscaling Service!

For the low low price of one of your organs you can have all your low resolution textures enlarged! *Some limitations apply

 

@ShikuTeshi and @Tucker933 will help you on your way to obtaining that PC Master Race experience for your Halo Custom Edition content!

With pure magic commonly known as Gigapixel by Topaz Labs you could see results like this! *Images presented contain 2K resolution textures that you can download here.

 

HOWEVER

You are required to prepare the files completely on your end. All we're doing here is upscaling your texture images. We are not here to prepare your entire texture tag for you.

1) If your texture is meant to be used as a multimap or sprite, you MUST decompose them into separate images beforehand. Gigapixel will NOT retain the right RGB channels for them to function as intended.

It's also highly recommended to just do this for every single texture you want to maximize image quality. You can then compose them back together for the final product when we return them.

 

2) Make sure your images are saved as a PNG or JPG image. Gigapixel will accept TIF format as well, but there's an issue related to it that I'm not sure was fixed yet.

 

3) Upload the images you want done individually to something like Google Drive or Mega. Any file share service will do as long as you can share an entire folder and we can preview all the images before downloading. These are just the services that I can confirm to do these and that I am personally comfortable with.

 

4) Create a post here with a link to the download folder and what scale you would like. We would like to keep it in moderation for what Halo's game engine is capable of. So it would either be a 2x upscale across the board or simply bring everything up to 2K.

The difference is the 2x upscale is in better moderation. So a 1024 size image will turn into a 2048, while lower resolutions like 256 go to 512 instead of 2048. This saves a lot of space where that higher resolution wouldn't make a difference for those textures in most cases.
But if you REALLY just want everything in 2K. Sure, we'll do that for you.

We will let you know when we have started on your images. Depending on the number you would like done and what type they are, it will take varying amounts of time that cannot be estimated.

 

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

If you provided us with a number of images, we will zip those beforehand to save space.

[DSalimander 107]

 

As you have noticed, running this on things like multipurpose bitmaps is a bad idea. But simply breaking them up into separate bitmaps per RGBA channels beforehand is not a great solution. I would advise against running this process on anything but the diffuse maps and then derive the new specular/illumination/multipurpose maps from those. It's a ton of work but if you don't do it that way, you risk having mismatched features of the bitmaps which could lead to really weird shader effects ingame. What about unwraps? The program might confuse the seams of an unwrap for edges it needs to alter and thus cause noticeable seams in the final ingame texture unwrapping. What about tiling textures? Does this program have an option to ensure the results correctly tile? There's a lot of potential for mistakes if you aren't careful with this. Everything you do this process to is going to need careful examination and possibly adjustment afterward. Sometimes just enlarging the bitmap in Photoshop using a predictable algorithm is better for video game assets like this. Sometimes the resolution isn't the problem at all and it was just poorly compressed last time it was compiled into Halo. And pro-tip some of the Halo 1 bitmaps exist in later Halo releases at higher resolutions.

 

TL;DR: If you're trying to improve the quality of a bitmap, there's no getting away from having to have to spend a lot of work on it and do so on a case-by-case basis. This is not a 1-step process and without knowing exactly how these bitmaps function in Halo, you might make things worse. This program isn't useless but I wouldn't exaggerate it's benefits either.

[Sunstriker7 280]

I would like to make a request. I made subfolders for the desired resolutions.

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w2tfG5XWVmMtUVEW00YEpcMkPJ5wLPzN?usp=sharing

[Tucker933 12,578]

1 minute ago, Sunstriker7 said:

I would like to make a request. I made subfolders for the desired resolutions.

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w2tfG5XWVmMtUVEW00YEpcMkPJ5wLPzN?usp=sharing

Those are some really solid choices. Going to let @ShikuTeshi get these though because I'm burned out and the weekend's only just begun.

[Sunstriker7 280]

No rush at all fellas

[ShikuTeshi 1,103]

9 minutes ago, Sunstriker7 said:

I would like to make a request. I made subfolders for the desired resolutions.

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w2tfG5XWVmMtUVEW00YEpcMkPJ5wLPzN?usp=sharing

Working on it.

Edit: It is done. https://opencarnage.net/misc/upscale/Sunstriker7 8-16-2019.zip