Doom Neural Upscale 2X [v 1.0]

[hidfan]

@lumbo7332 sure, all this is for the community.

No need to credit me.

 

@MF_Kitten best results are obtained by working on color and transparency separately.

Transparency is pure binary black&white, and those ESRGANs have not been trained for that.

 

Different subject : it's already so hard for me to finish the first original version, that I think I won't be able to work on compatibilities such as minor sprite fixes or smooth doom.

Or not before a very long time.

[J Bro]

Can you release the 8x upscaled textures from before you downscaled them to 2x in a pk3?

[PopeRigby]

8 hours ago, hidfan said:

@lumbo7332 sure, all this is for the community.

No need to credit me.

 

@MF_Kitten best results are obtained by working on color and transparency separately.

Transparency is pure binary black&white, and those ESRGANs have not been trained for that.

 

Different subject : it's already so hard for me to finish the first original version, that I think I won't be able to work on compatibilities such as minor sprite fixes or smooth doom.

Or not before a very long time.

I'm assuming I can just drop the unzipped file into the BD folder, right? Never mind. I got it.

Edited February 24, 2019 by lumbo7332

[hoover1979]

@Hidfan.  I want to personally thank you for your efforts.  I am working on textures but working on sprites is a foreign concept to me (at least at the moment) it's great to know someone else is revamping the sprites.

Keep up the great work!

[PopeRigby]

What does stepfix.wad do?

[PopeRigby]

Deleted

Edited August 4, 2019 by PopeRigby

[Get Phobo]

So, I took the monster sprites from this pack, loaded them into Topaz A.I. Gigapixel, and upscaled them another 4x.

 

This is what it looks like (JPEG, 1920x1080, 150KB~300KB per file):

 

Zombies look a bit funny.
Shotgun guy: https://imgur.com/7hu8Fye
You can see some jagging: https://imgur.com/6gHsQFL
Pistol zombie: https://imgur.com/5e3lLgp
https://imgur.com/MSOmxZN
https://imgur.com/FJeHmg3
https://imgur.com/havAm9K

 

Imps attacking: https://imgur.com/Nd5Zrlc
...and dead: https://imgur.com/OlXGxRI

 

Pinkies: https://imgur.com/TGJbVia

 

Cacodemon: https://imgur.com/bcROGQq
...attacking: https://imgur.com/we3kvsa
...and getting sawed: https://imgur.com/Xtt57By
Original 2x dead: https://imgur.com/waTgrmJ (I accidently skipped that one, but it's a nice comparison.)

 

Lost Soul: https://imgur.com/dOgfFw4
...getting sawed: https://imgur.com/lykCN7w
...exploding: https://imgur.com/zAOnW6S

 

Barons: https://imgur.com/ZAx8l0t
https://imgur.com/upxmhAz
...attacking: https://imgur.com/ZiQt1FZ

 

Spider Mastermind: https://imgur.com/dB2UKUD
...attacking: https://imgur.com/BYpg09m

 

Cyberdemon: https://imgur.com/6N3wnxQ

 

And the Doom 2 bestiary doesn't look any worse, either. While not ultimately perfect, it's still a pretty amazing technology nevertheless. It is most impressive how far AI has come.

Edited March 4, 2019 by Get Phobo : Needed to correct the links.

[Gifty]

While I still think x4 looks weird and detracts from the game's art style, I have to say the player weapons don't look half bad at that scale!

[Rex705]

The Zombies are a bit weird looking but everything else looks great.

[Get Phobo]

Like I wrote, I only upscaled the monster sprites. Everything else is mods. I use the latest Beautiful Doom with the HRRP v0.13 Performance pack that was specifically designed for it; and for textures, I use Hoover1979's 2K texture pack, with missing 2K textures replaced by some of his 1K textures. Hoover1979's pack is much less loyal to the original (vanilla) textures and offers a quite over-the-top design in some cases, but I like it.

 

BTW, it's 8x, not 4x, since the base material is upscaled 2x already. I've been experimenting some more with the Topaz software, and what I've found is that repeatedly upscaling stuff by 2x gives a substantially better quality that doing it straight 4x, so their 2x algorithm seems to be a better one, at least for the kind of stuff we're dealing with. I've now started upscaling Doom's vanilla textures, but it takes a lot of time doing them triple-2x to get a reasonable resolution.

[Gifty]

Oops, well I'm stupid. :p

[Get Phobo]

My screenshots are a bit misleading, I admit, but I it was also my intention to demonstrate an all-HD setup and how it all fits.

[NightFright]

In case it hasn't been suggested yet: To prevent a warning to appear regarding actor BurningBarrel being defined already, it's better to replace the code in decorate_burningbarrel.dec with this simpler solution:

ACTOR BurningBarrelNUS: BurningBarrel replaces BurningBarrel
{
    Scale .5
}

On top of that, consider using PNGOptimizer to reduce PNG filesize - the reduction is quite considerable (down to 42% of uncompressed total filesize). After optimization, the whole pack would be just about 78MB without any zip compression applied.

Edited March 6, 2019 by NightFright

[J Bro]

23 hours ago, Get Phobo said:

Like I wrote, I only upscaled the monster sprites. Everything else is mods. I use the latest Beautiful Doom with the HRRP v0.13 Performance pack that was specifically designed for it; and for textures, I use Hoover1979's 2K texture pack, with missing 2K textures replaced by some of his 1K textures. Hoover1979's pack is much less loyal to the original (vanilla) textures and offers a quite over-the-top design in some cases, but I like it.

 

BTW, it's 8x, not 4x, since the base material is upscaled 2x already. I've been experimenting some more with the Topaz software, and what I've found is that repeatedly upscaling stuff by 2x gives a substantially better quality that doing it straight 4x, so their 2x algorithm seems to be a better one, at least for the kind of stuff we're dealing with. I've now started upscaling Doom's vanilla textures, but it takes a lot of time doing them triple-2x to get a reasonable resolution.

 

Can you do 8x and release it? I love the smooth high quality over the pixelated look of 2x.

[Get Phobo]

Honestly, I'd prefer hidfan releasing his 8x graphics by himself.

 

I cannot really get a good-enough quality at the moment. Triple 2x upscaling of vanilla graphics turned out to be a worse solution, so I'd have to stick with some intelligent upscaling approach for hidfan's graphics anyway.

[Judicator]

Thanks.

[elend]

I saw this just today. Could this be useful in creating 16 rotations of the original Doom sprites?

https://www.patreon.com/spritestack

[J Bro]

On 3/6/2019 at 1:10 PM, Get Phobo said:

Honestly, I'd prefer hidfan releasing his 8x graphics by himself.

 

I hope he does. Hexen looks fantastic with 8x textures.

[rockbuddy9]

Hey I am loving looking at this mod there is just one problem....

The current download file actually doesn't have a .pk3, it's a zip file and I cannot use it.

Am I just braindead?

 

Edited March 15, 2019 by rockbuddy9 : Updated image (hide personal information)

[elend]

Rename this .zip to .pk3. Then it'll work.

[AschTheConjurer]

I have a feeling this incoming devil's advocacy will go badly, judging by the 14 pages of fairly unanimous praise, but....

This sprite pack just looks like the artificial sprite smoothing/scaling effect that Doomsday had last time I saw it several years ago, and GZDoom still has, even down to how it makes the edges of the sprites look unnaturally soft and.... just wrong. I suppose the sprites look nicer after they've been touched up after the fact, but I feel like that's cheating, because at that stage you might as well just redo the sprite altogether anyway.

 

I dunno, I guess the purpose of me saying this is to make a public fool out of myself by admitting I don't really see why this is going as far as getting press attention, and why most of this thread seems to think the sprite pack is the second coming of Romero, when all I see is a sprite pack that looks.... weird.

 

I suppose it has something to do with it being a good opportunity to promote whatever new neural net software has helped make it?

[elend]

It is definitely not for everyone and some people might dislike it, yes. But, to not see the difference to those sprite smoothing, bicubic interpolating or GzDoom Open GL resizing filters, is a bit odd. Did you look at the wrong examples maybe? Did you accidentally turn on texture interpolation in your GzDoom setup?

 

Those neural upscales differ in two key areas to everything else:

- They retain that "pixel art" look.

- They are not overly blurry.

[Krull]

I have found another use for this mod.

 

[TR2N]

Is this project dead? 

[hidfan]

@TR2NNo, but I have a lot of difficulties finding time/conditions to "finish" (close) it.
Real Life can be complicated sometimes.

[hidfan]

Btw, as requested, I started reducing size and uploading the 8x source files in March (2019).

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1BluJVmMmthQWdTY-BUMJ7TJQggP4rzVZ

I don't know yet if everything is here (big upload + slow internet connection = launch it then go to work... I need time to check if everything is up to date)
All files are from march 2019, when I worked on reducing / uploading them. 

[Get Phobo]

RL stole my time, too, over the last weeks.

 

However, I tried batch-resizing your 2x monster sprites using the 6xBRZ HQ rescaler. While it isn't anywhere near HD, it still does look smoother than just the vanilla textures rescaled and also more accentuated.

 

Here's a comparison in QZDoom. On the left is vanilla rescaled 4xBRZ (that port doesn't feature a 6x rescaler), on the right is your 2x sprites rescaled with 6xBRZ (so that's 12x altogether):

 

https://imgur.com/5xLJeEY | https://imgur.com/cTbxjbN

 

While the imp's spikes are thinner, he still does look meaner. So there's a trade-off but also a gain.

 

Pinkies: https://imgur.com/4kYeA42 | https://imgur.com/yhIVDPF

Caco: https://imgur.com/FtffIJ0 | https://imgur.com/r9Wi8Mi

Edited April 25, 2019 by Get Phobo : Put actual links.

[Sweety8088]

On ‎4‎/‎25‎/‎2019 at 8:34 PM, hidfan said:

Btw, as requested, I started reducing size and uploading the 8x source files in March (2019).

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1BluJVmMmthQWdTY-BUMJ7TJQggP4rzVZ

I don't know yet if everything is here (big upload + slow internet connection = launch it then go to work... I need time to check if everything is up to date)
All files are from march 2019, when I worked on reducing / uploading them. 

 

It's art.
When will you be able to see the new version?

[theleo_ua]

GZDoom 4.1.0 Released: https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=64485

 

And important change, which may broke current Neural pack:

 

Quote

changed the filter name for Doom IWADs

It's "doom.id.doom1/2" instead of "doom.doom1/2" now.
The config file's content will be renamed and for lump filtering a fallback has been added - note that you cannot combine both naming schemes! The old one has to be considered deprecated now.

This also removes the duplicated content necessitated by the old naming scheme.

 

I suggest to update Neural pack and check that it works in new GZDoom correctly

[NightFright]

I don't think that the old syntax won't work any more. Too many mods would be affected. Also, updating to the new syntax would mean you MUST use GZDoom 4.1.0 or newer, which is probably not a wise course of action right now. Unless you want to force people to upgrade their GZDoom version.