Akven on 12/7/2020 at 20:29
The bigger the resolution the fewer artifacts are visible cause they occur on 4x4 blocks.
It's clearly visible on the examples. Upscaled textures compressed too, but you don't see such big blocks of artifacts like in the original.
lowenz on 12/7/2020 at 21:03
Are you re-compressing in DXT5 (if there's an alpha channel) to minimize the artifacts?
Akven on 12/7/2020 at 21:09
I recompress textures with alpha channel to DXT3 (as they were ingame originally). I can do DXT5 if you want but I don't think it will be much difference
lowenz on 12/7/2020 at 21:34
Your call man, if you think there's no visual difference do as you prefer!
Judith on 13/7/2020 at 05:28
It's still kind of brute-forcing through it, as you get a large and blurry textures with sort of like emboss filter applied to them. With textures this large you can easily have really detailed surfaces, but you'd have to author them manually. At some point, increasing the texture size will just increase strain put on your hardware, not much else.
lowenz on 13/7/2020 at 08:48
These results are (very) good, I don't see any need to manually edit them (talking about normal maps)
Judith on 13/7/2020 at 13:41
I was talking about 2k and above, but yeah, even 1k textures are pretty simplistic for the amount of pixels they actually contain. Something that wasn't there at 256 px won't magically appear at 1024 px or more.
lowenz on 13/7/2020 at 18:25
AI inference can do SOME magic :p
Akven on 14/7/2020 at 05:55
Judith, the idea of the mod is just to upscale original game, not introduce my own vision. I can recreate normals from scratch with improved amount of details (and I've done this for missing normals), but I don't think it is right.
From my tests DXT compression begin to kill original normals starting from 512x512 size especially on textures with huge blocks like this
(
https://imgsli.com/MTg5NzE/12/13)
So they need to be 1024x1024 at least, and most of them are in mod.
Due to the process of upscaling Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3, the real difference in texture sizes is mostly x2, not x4. Cause developers used low-res XBOX textures and just upscaled them twice for the PC (I think they were trying to get rid/let loose of DXT compression artifacts by this). So basicaly I'm upscaling those XBOX sized textures (I x2 downscale PC textures (esrganed with de-DXT model and saved to PNG) and ESRGAN them with x4 upscale model).
I can upload XBOX vs original textures in the evening, even if I am lazy)
Judith on 14/7/2020 at 10:01
It's expected for the DXT compression to destroy normals, DX1 to DX3 was never made with that in mind (but developers used it anyway, possibly because of original Xbox memory constrains).
But what I'm trying to say is that this is diminishing returns kind of project. Much longer loading times aren't worth the slight increase in quality. Working on lossless quality material and perhaps an approach similar to a remaster would be much more worth of both your time, and would justify the better hardware / longer loading times for the audience.