Doom Neural Upscale 2X [v 1.0]

[elend]

Don't worry about alpha stuff, I think that would be the easiest thing to fix afterwards. Can't access googledrive here at the moment, but will try to check out some stuff once my VPN works.

[hidfan]

19 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

I suspected that the images you posted are not simply a result of processing with NVIDIA's neural network and have been post-processed. Can you describe in detail what you did and with what tools?

 

 

I wrote the process in the first post :

-open the 8x files
-downsize 50% with bicubic interpolation to absorb some noise (especially from the PhotoHallucination files)
-then 50% with nearest neighbour for the pixel art effect

Maybe I added a "remove noise" filter in the 8X Photo enhanced version before downsizing, but I'm not sure (I should have written all that  :/)

pack them in a psd with this structure :
-Original Texture (upscaled 2X nearest neighbour) (with a mask, to let it override unwanted pixels in the upscaled results (too bright, too dark, new unwantedcolor (blue for instance)
-Nvidia Photo Hallucination 50%
-Nvidia Standard


For the alphas of sprites,
- upscale it in photoshop 4x or 8x with bicubic interpolation
- blur, contrast, blur, contrast, this will smooth the "stairs" and transform them into a curvy black and white pure mask. 
- downsize with nearest neighbour to the wanted resolution.
Then, I need to compare original mask and the new one, to add or remove pixels where needed.
 

[MrFlibble]

On 10/19/2018 at 4:32 PM, hidfan said:

-Nvidia (8x) standard technique and "PhotoHallucination"" enhanced" (b suffix)

It appears that the PhotoHallucination scaling is the primary source of the extra pixel-ish detail in the textures (the "standard technique" actually looks pretty bland IMO). However it is my understanding that this kind of functionality is originally intended for adding extra imaginary detail to resized photographs (e.g. Let's Enhance boasts that neural network hallucinating will add missing details to a photo) and when applied to textures it produces something that looks like output of one of Photoshop's artistic filters — somewhere in between a pencil sketch and a crayon drawing (admittedly, it looks very cool). Have you actually considered alternatives to achieve a similar effect, perhaps without any neural network processing altogether?

[Triple_sSs]

I really like the Nvidia upscales in the OP! Some of the wall textures look really impressive & realistic while still keeping that Doom-y feel to it. I'm hoping these upscales could be used in a future project!

[VGA]

If someone can create a wad that works with Gzdoom so we could see them in game, that'd be cool.

[Gifty]

Wow, these looks fantastic. I've never liked Doom HD texture wads at all, but these are truly in another class.

[hidfan]

Here is the less bugged PK3 I have achieved, it contains the zombie, the items, the face HUD, and all the textures/flats I did before, nothing new yet.
First feeling of the textures ingame, one year later : I don't like the noise, I already cleaned a lot of it, but there is still a lot of cleaning work needed.

However, if some textures on walls are working now, some still don't. ex : in Doom's E1M1 hangar, support2 is not scaled properly for instance, many many others are wrong.

I still need help to make the hires pak work :(

I've been told to change the names (I've found in slade, different namings in TEXTURE1), some patches are made from different textures (If I understand well this part), but I don't have textures corresponding to these to renamed patches.
For instance : BIGDOOR5 is made of WALL40_1 and WALL42_3. 
What is the Hires folder looking for? BIGDOOR5 ? WALL40_1 or both? some in textures, some in patches?

 

[Empyre]

11 minutes ago, hidfan said:

Here is the less bugged PK3 I have achieved, it contains the zombie, the items, the face HUD, and all the textures/flats I did before, nothing new yet.
First feeling of the textures ingame, one year later : I don't like the noise, I already cleaned a lot of it, but there is still a lot of cleaning work needed.

However, if some textures on walls are working now, some still don't. ex : in Doom's E1M1 hangar, support2 is not scaled properly for instance, many many others are wrong.

I still need help to make the hires pak work :(

I've been told to change the names (I've found in slade, different namings in TEXTURE1), some patches are made from different textures (If I understand well this part), but I don't have textures corresponding to these to renamed patches.
For instance : BIGDOOR5 is made of WALL40_1 and WALL42_3. 
What is the Hires folder looking for? BIGDOOR5 ? WALL40_1 or both? some in textures, some in patches?

 

I might be wrong, but I don't think you can make hi-res textures out of patches.

[elend]

I want to help with the pixel cleanup at least. Unfortunately I am also not really good at this .wad and TEXTURES stuff, because I am a newbie. :_( Do you need anything else? Can I buy you a beer? 

[Teder]

@hidfan Cut all files from Textures and Flats Directory in your pk3 and paste to Patches Directory.

For fast it works

Even transparent textures:

Edited October 22, 2018 by Teder

[hidfan]

both methods  (patches or flats/textures) don't work actually (doom2 first map is always screwed)

 

3 hours ago, Empyre said:

I might be wrong, but I don't think you can make hi-res textures out of patches.

I tried to look into some doom HD textures paks to understand how they managed to make it work, but with no luck, a lot of things seemed to be embedded or hidden.

[hidfan]

for doom1 E1M1, almost all textures work, excepted support2 .
for doom2 map01 it's almost 100% of textures
 

[Teder]

@hidfanYou should use textures to rescale not patches. Thanks to that You got proper names. Hires paks contain textures, not patches. They got rescaled textures, not patches. Thanks to that they got properly named textures. In Slade You can do it like this, look:

 

I'll take a look for this support.

 

EDIT: for now I think is almost perfect. There are two support2.png files, both same name, but deleted one of them doesn't fix the problem.

 

EDIT2: Patches doesn't work properly. In entryway tekgren2 is not scaled.

 

EDIT3: no, many textures don't work proper. If You can batch rescale process, extract in Slade all textures as is shown on first picture above. 

 

 

Edited October 22, 2018 by Teder

[hidfan]

Thanks for your help Teder.
If I understand Edit3 : HIRES folder is looking for the texture naming (ASHWALL2 instead of RW22_1), and textures built with other ones (bigdoor1, or suport2 for instance) have to be replaced entirely. (so, anyone building textures with this feature won't have the upscaled version).
This means I have to rename my existing files, find the missing ones and upscale them.

On a side note I have good news :
If I blend 40% the 6x AI-gigapixel versions (denoised first, dowscaled with nearest neighbour, then offset 1pixel X Y (this offset is needed because it's 6X and not 8x), I'm a lot closer to the original (color, contrast,etc...), it's a bit less sharp than what I want (vannilla pixel art feeling), but actual sharpness was really too noisy.
 

 

Edit : I tried some sharpen (I usually dislike sharpen filter because it changes brights and darks) with a special blending of the original to remove whites.

 

Edited October 23, 2018 by hidfan

[Gifty]

Wow, that looks AWESOME.

[elend]

Yes, this looks already quite amazing, imho. A little bit of pixel cleanup and BAM, there you go. One of the most awesome mods since SmoothDoom. Speaking of which, you'd use @Gifty 's SmoothDoom sprites, right? :p

[Teder]

@hidfan wow it looks fantastic! Details are better than I can imagine.

"If I understand Edit3 : HIRES folder is looking for the texture naming (ASHWALL2 instead of RW22_1)" - yes. Faster than rename patches to textures is build new batch from textures, because for example: support2 contains 6 patches, so it won't work if You just rename some patches.

[Koko Ricky]

Really wowed by what's possible with algorithmic assistance these days. This is the only upscaling project I've been impressed by as of late. 

[hidfan]

4 hours ago, elend said:

Yes, this looks already quite amazing, imho. A little bit of pixel cleanup and BAM, there you go. One of the most awesome mods since SmoothDoom. Speaking of which, you'd use @Gifty 's SmoothDoom sprites, right? :p

Not Yet. As you can see, working with original files is already big/hard enough for my noob skills.
When I'll be more experimented, if I have enough energy and motivation left, and time,  I'll learn how smoothdoom works, and how to upscale it.
 

[VGA]

Smooth Doom has more animation frames than the original games. And it has alternative animations and such. It doesn't really matter how it works, if you take its resources and give them the Neuro-HD treatment then load them in a wad after Smooth Doom (in the load order) and see the changes.

[hidfan]

Nice, thanks for the info VGA.
Yet, for maximum community compatibility I prefer
>SmoothDoom.wad
>>DoomUpscale.wad
>>>SmoothDoomUpscale.wad (only what has been added/changed in smoothdoom)
 

[Gifty]

I know this project is still in its early stages and we're still sort of figuring out the basics, but I would be extraordinarily interested in collaborating on a Smoothed+Upscaled remaster of Doom. It would be a ton of work but I think it would potentially be an insanely cool project.

 

Even at this stage I'd love to pull some weight doing cleanup work on the upscales that you've already produced! 

Edited October 23, 2018 by Gifty

[hidfan]

Thanks Gifty, When I'll reach alpha stage, additional cleaning will be welcome.
I'm understanding more how the textures work now.
It's really sad  \Hires folder isn't working with patches, everything has to be remade. This system was probably created to lower pressure on texture production, and I can feel it.

I wanted to to a single wad upscale, for doom1 and doom2, but it seems I have to duplicate files. 
BRNPOIS is 64x128 in Doom1 and 128x128 in Doom2
Also sky names 1 2 3 are overlaping.
oh..I just discovered "TEXTURE2" in doom.wad ... and additional missing textures such as BROWNWEL  COMPHSO DOORHI GRAYDANG.
This is a bit messy and so depressing -_-
 

[Empyre]

In Slade, you can save the textures made from patches as single images, which could then be upscaled by your methods.

[hidfan]

Yes Empyre, I didn't know that the day I extracted the files, and I extracted patches instead of textures for doom2  (doom1 was ok but, I missed the texture2 part)
Nvidia's Tool process only 2 files at a time, and the max resolution it produces is 8192x8192, so I need to pack things into 1024x1024 atlases.
the 8k results can weight 80Mo, it's long to download and their naming is some kind of ugly 324GER745G3S3456473gsgrt.png 
It's not made for industrial production so I won't rebatch (and I already did too much pixel edits on the existing ones). 
I'll just sort and reorganize my mess and batch only what's needed.

 

[Teder]

@hidfan oh, that bad they can't be batched :( Best way for now is to build textures from Your upscaled patches, and rename them.

[MrFlibble]

In the meantime, I was tinkering further with waifu2x and discovered an interesting thing.

 

There are two modes it can process images for scaling, RGB mode and Y channel mode. I would stick with RGB as this is the default thing and only accidentally used Y channel scaling once and didn't like it. However when I started trying out different combinations of settings for scaling the sprites, I found that using the Y channel can sometimes produce quite a difference.

 

Here's a set of Doom sprites I used above, processed with RGB scaling at 4x the original size, TTA set to 4 (edged softened with the xBRZ method):

And here's the same image processed with Y channel scaling:

Quite a difference eh? The only thing is that so far I haven't figured out a good way to extract the sprites from the background because Y channel mode does a huge deal of blurring around the edges unlike the RGB mode. It's also highly dependent on background colour because if black or white background is used the edges will be less pronounced:

Another thing to note is that waifu2x and waifu2x-caffe apparently use the same or very similar models for RGB scaling and different models for Y channel scaling, producing noticeably different results. The above images were created with waifu2x, so far they seem better.

[DooM_RO]

@hidfan

 

This is just...unbelievable. The first image is the best IMO.

 

Is Smooth Doom compatibility still in the works?

Edited October 24, 2018 by DooM_RO

[DooM_RO]

@hidfan

 

Hmm, I actually think a tiny BIT of blurriness helps. I like it because it smooths it a bit but retains that pixelly look.

 

The fat layers on the lower Mancubus pictures look a bit too sharp imo, like sculpted details that haven't been finished yet.

 

Edited October 25, 2018 by DooM_RO

[Empyre]

12 hours ago, DooM_RO said:

The fat layers on the lower Mancubus pictures look a bit too sharp imo, like sculpted details that haven't been finished yet.

I agree. They look like they painted on, rather than actual shadows.