Author Topic: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project  (Read 60599 times)

obesebear

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #50 on: 2020-05-16 12:08:31 »
I think umdgen can repack the files into iso format. Don't know too much about it though

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #51 on: 2020-05-18 21:51:46 »
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/99BCCNNU

https://imgur.com/a/dpGaxV3 < to view full resolution

Some things to note:

Switched to Topaz Gigapixel AI because the results are way better and easier to work with

Changed texture hash method to xhh64 to eliminate need to sort/delete duplicates.

Devina

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #52 on: 2020-05-20 09:07:47 »
Yeah, you can see how the upscaling is a mixed bag...

Aerith's hair and eyebrows look better.

Some stuff like her dress (the flowers on them too), eyes and lips could use some refining.

If you look closely at the chandeliers, the transparency got messed up...

I have an idea, how about upscaling the whole game, then posting all the textures on Github?

Then everyone could work on it like a group project, playing the game from the beginning to the end, manually fixing errors, etc. I could help you out on that, but we'd all need a basic framework to start from.

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #53 on: 2020-05-21 01:03:53 »
Yeah, I’ve noticed those issues. Usually they are the lower resolution textures. What I’ve been working on the past few days in my off time has been developing a tool to classify the images and organize them.

ESRGAN handles certain images better than Topaz and vice versa. Very low res images (<32 px) probably need to be upscaled to something larger with nearest neighbor first before scaling with the AI or straight up done by hand because the ai tries to add too many details that don’t exist. Textures with text also get pretty messed up with either ai.

The aim of the tool is to categorize the textures in a speedy manner so they can be put into the appropriate workflow. It can also be used to evaluate the quality of the upscaled textures and designate them for clean up / masking.

I’ve been playing through the game too. My work is going back to normal so I don’t have as much time but I’ve been able to get in a couple of hours a day.

GitHub is a good idea. I have tomorrow off of work so I will probably have the evaluator done by then and I’ll upload some stuff.

Edit: haven’t finished yet, it’s a little more complicated than I realized. I’m pretty close though.
« Last Edit: 2020-05-22 02:27:41 by eqprog »

oceaniz

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #54 on: 2020-05-22 22:14:21 »
Hey so I hate to barge in like this but I have been looking for something for hours and since it has to do with Crisis Core Upscaling and this is the only still active thread on the topic I could find, I need to ask:

Is there any way to replace the FMVs of the game with the AI Upscaled ones? is anyone doing that? and if not, would it be possible?

Thank you in advance for your time, and again sorry for interjecting like this!

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #55 on: 2020-05-23 03:31:22 »
I think it could be done with UMDgen so long as the video was in the right format. Consider it a stretch goal.

edit:

I've been messing around with textures with the weird halo artifact using photoshop. Loading the layer transparency as a selection and then using select and mask has been pretty effective. This isn't a perfect example by any means if you're looking very closely but they are actually pretty small elements in the game.

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/999BFNNU
« Last Edit: 2020-05-23 05:02:51 by eqprog »

oceaniz

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #56 on: 2020-05-23 14:49:05 »
Thanks for the response!

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #57 on: 2020-05-25 02:16:28 »
https://i.imgur.com/2w7zZXJ.jpg

Tried my hand at applying some texture to Zack's clothing. I was aiming to give the texture an appearance more like how it appears in cutscenes. I don't think I quite achieved it but I think it ends up looking better than a straight upscale. (You can look at Angeal's sweater to compare how the AI scaling appears - open in a new tab to see full resolution). Once I have a more solid release ready I'll also have a separate upload containing psd files for the masks. That way any edits will hopefully be easier to make :)

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/777WGNNX

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #58 on: 2020-05-27 18:43:02 »
Finally got my tablet in. I'm definitely not a professional with it, but I decided to experiment today with a texture that really bothered me... The Loveless Poster in Midgar. I had to spend a few hours on it but I should get faster as I become acclimated to using the tablet.

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/99FBJNNU - textures
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/77KL7NNX - in-game comparison

Really a lot of the signs didn't come out very well... but this one is so prominent that it really stuck out to me. Honestly a lot of the originals look better than the upscaled versions because the AI doesn't know how to handle that kind of detail. Plus, the player really doesn't get to look at many of them very close because of the way the camera works in the game.


eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #59 on: 2020-06-01 04:56:18 »
Its almost ready....



So far I've got it displaying all of the textures I've dumped so far and it saves all the relevant attributes and categorizations in a database and even remembers where the user left off.

Just a few more things to get implemented:

Show upscaled texture in right panel and switch/compare against ESRGAN copy
Add buttons to open up upscaled texture in user's default editor/viewer
Filters to only display certain categories

Work has picked up again and there is rioting and other nonsense going on in my city (and I don't even live in the North!) so progress isn't going as fast as I'd like but I'm still working a little on it every day.

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #60 on: 2020-06-02 04:59:00 »
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tJFU5elrxa6qebSbycpGzO4nxNmtAGC8/view?usp=sharing

Getting pretty close to finishing, sharing what I have so far. I'm right at Chapter 8 in the game and I'm about 20% done with the missions, so I should have nearly all the textures. I'll edit this message later with a readme.

Everything in the link goes in the ULUS10336 Directory.

Devina

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #61 on: 2020-06-02 22:03:14 »
You've been keeping multiple save files in case you need to go back, right? In case you don't, I have like 10-15 prepped. You can also assign a button in PPSSPP to quickly enable/disable textures by pressing a button so you can easily compare what looks better or worse.

I've been checking out various areas and it looks good! Of course, we'll need to go back and look for all those messed-up 2D elements like posters and road signs that got messed up.

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/77WDPNNX

Some errors I noticed:

- The pavement outlines of the bricks are gone
- The beach skies and waves at Costa beach are messed up
- The soft glows at the highway look pixelated, because a lighting texture got upscaled in a bad way.

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #62 on: 2020-06-03 16:21:44 »




What do you all think of this textured look?

Edit:
You've been keeping multiple save files in case you need to go back, right? In case you don't, I have like 10-15 prepped. You can also assign a button in PPSSPP to quickly enable/disable textures by pressing a button so you can easily compare what looks better or worse.

I've been checking out various areas and it looks good! Of course, we'll need to go back and look for all those messed-up 2D elements like posters and road signs that got messed up.

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/77WDPNNX

Some errors I noticed:

- The pavement outlines of the bricks are gone
- The beach skies and waves at Costa beach are messed up
- The soft glows at the highway look pixelated, because a lighting texture got upscaled in a bad way.

Yes, I actually have a lot of saves but I might have missed some areas earlier in the game before I realized that you can only have 5 save states.  If I need a certain area I will let you know - thanks.

The fine transparency/detail textures (fog, clouds, water etc) will probably best be left as is unless you or someone else has the skill to fix them. Both ESRGAN and Topaz apply really weird color artifacts to the edges because weren’t designed with transparency in mind I guess. They can usually be seen around the black halo effects in the form of hyper-blue or red pixels. I’m not capable enough to fix them accurately with transparency and honestly they scale up on their own good enough.

I have developed a few techniques that have helped to reduce/remove the artifacts in non-transparent textures though. Once I get off work I’ll try to create a step-by-step guide and a couple of actions I’ve created.
« Last Edit: 2020-06-03 16:56:35 by eqprog »

laujclan

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #63 on: 2020-06-04 01:23:39 »
Hi everyone,

This is my first post but it's a useful one I hope.

Seeing the many contributions to this project, I was inspired and wanted to share what I have been working on during the past few weeks. It was shocking to me that Banora looked so bad, and because Banora has such a profound meaning to the game I went ahead and made some updates to the horrible looking textures there.



You can find the files here:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/x8x5skzigiclvlt/FFV7-HD-TEXTURES.rar/file

« Last Edit: 2020-06-05 05:42:38 by laujclan »

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #64 on: 2020-06-05 04:53:04 »
Devina,

I’m nearing completion of my evaluator tool. It might be unnecessary in end but I feel that it will streamline the workflow. You mentioned using github in a previous post. I’m aware of what it is of course but honestly I have no idea how to use it. Can we in fact upload images there?

Changing topics  Right now the evaluator uses SQLite for the database (which is strictly offline), but if multiple users are to use it I would need to have an online database. It seems like a waste to pay money to host a database that is less than 500kb... but I’ll see what can be done.

Edit: Probably what is just split the textures into chunks and divide them up... I think I’m getting in over my head with the server stuff.

https://imgur.com/GkssnZz
« Last Edit: 2020-06-05 19:58:30 by eqprog »

Devina

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #65 on: 2020-06-05 18:43:29 »
That's really cool laujclan, although maybe you should wait until me and eqprog work out our version. Also, aren't they called Banora White because the trees are supposed to be white?

Github is easy, it just lets you upload your work online. Then you can give permissions to people who are allowed to work on the project, and they can upload/update textures one by one.

https://github.com/AkiraJkr/Birth-by-Sleep-HD-ReMix

Here's an example. Then people can download the "master version" easily which contains everything updated.

Once you're done the beta (when you finish the game), you should post everything in a new topic, I imagine we might have 5000 textures once you're done. Then the next step would be to skim all these 5000 textures for things like posters that got upscaled poorly.

I also fixed the issues in Costa del Sol (the sky's a bit brighter as a side effect, but it's no biggie).

laujclan

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #66 on: 2020-06-05 20:00:21 »
Oh damn, lmao.  Thanks for pointing that out Devina.  My recollection with FFVII:CC is really bad.  I haven't played the game since 2008.  Somehow that made it past my fuzzy memory.  Well, the funny thing is that I initially made the branches white, then I realized it didn't match the tree texture that was already in the HD texture pack from Jack Blackadder's website. So I went back and made it brown.  :-D

I've currently stopped my progress in the game since Banora was so "unloved", it led me to rediscover my photoshopping skills. What's unfortunate is that FFVII:CC is not getting as much love as it should so I'm down to help out whenever I can. 

In the meantime, since it may take a while for you and eqprog to upscale the textures, maybe I'll play the game as is for now. Probing in the texture folder's have led to accidental spoilers, lol.  Like eqprog, I'm not familiar with Github, so I'll take a look at the link and try to figure how that all work out.

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #67 on: 2020-06-07 13:54:41 »
Devina email me @gmail.com with your github username

Devina

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #68 on: 2020-06-07 20:27:43 »
I sent it to you via forum PM, see it?

LeonhartGR

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #69 on: 2020-06-08 01:01:08 »
I love your new avatar Dev! ;)

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #70 on: 2020-06-08 01:37:57 »
Yes, it’s nice! I sent you the invite Devina. There should be some pretty basic instructions in the commits, let me know if you need any help getting things up and running.

For the evaluator, you can put in a custom name for the texture - for now it only saves the name in the database but the plan at the end is that the evaluator or a separate script will rename the textures, organize them into folders based on their categories, and then generate a textures.ini file. I figure not every texture need a custom name.

There is a photoshop action I included. Really the most useful one is FFCC mask which will tighten up a lot of the fuzzy edges however it’s not perfect. The dodge and burn action creates two adjustment layers for lightening and darkening the images. See some of the psds in the edits folder for examples. It can really bring out a lot of detail in a subtle yet non-destructive manner.

One action I didn’t include is this one by PiXimperfect for frequency separation. I use it to help remove some of the random ripple textures that the AI adds in some instances. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hgR_1mWShxYesDBkA_WveXdmwmnbkZ3r/view - check out this video for a basic overview on how it works. https://youtu.be/-iGB2BfEu20 Basically it separates the image texture data from the color data so you can remove/edit the perceived texture without messing with the color too much.

As far as fixing random color artifacts I use the brush tool set to the “color” or “hue” blending mode. A lot can be done as well by using the match color feature under adjust image and using the original texture as a source.

And at the end of the day some are just going to have to have a lot of manual fixing.

Edit: one last note: this doesn’t have all of the textures quite yet. My work schedule got changed up so I really haven’t had too much free time to complete my play through but now that we have GitHub I’ll just add the new textures to the repository whenever I’m done.

Edit 2: use the wip edits branch for now.
« Last Edit: 2020-06-08 15:22:18 by eqprog »

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #71 on: 2020-06-12 23:30:51 »
Original:


AI Upscaled | Modified


Pretty happy with this one too as its very visible to the player.
« Last Edit: 2020-06-13 18:08:41 by eqprog »

laujclan

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #72 on: 2020-06-15 01:28:09 »
Looks great eqprog. Keep it going~!  8-)

eqprog

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #73 on: 2020-06-15 15:38:22 »
Thank you. The project has ended up being much bigger in scope than I initially envisioned so your encouraging words sincerely help to motivate me, laujclan! Today I'm both off of work and have no additional obligations. I'm going to finish the game today and I will have hopefully all the textures dumped. I didn't use a guide while playing through the game so unfortunately that means I might be missing some.

Plan for today:
  • Finish game
  • Upscale remaining dumps
  • Finish sorting textures with Evaluator
  • Add feature to organize upscaled textures in Directories
  • Update textures.ini
  • Update github to include branches for each texture category
  • Update github master branch for currently functioning version
After I get done with this I will publish information about the github page, which will be public and open to contributions from the community.

Keep in mind:
  • Any contributions must be the contributor's original works.
  • Do not include Images taken from GIS or other such sources unless you can demonstrate that they are in the public domain or a public license. (In the later case adequate citation and/or credit must be provided)
  • Do not contribute artwork from another creator's project.
The last point there is a touchy subject - obviously we cannot distribute other people's work without explicit permission. Technically speaking, even hosting the dumped textures online is a copyright violation (I really hope this doesn't bite me in the ass...) and I wouldn't want to land myself in even more trouble by offending members of the community. Furthermore, without being able to verify that other's work are their own I would prefer not to include contributions from other projects unless the originality of their work can be verified.

Devina

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Re: [CC:FF7 PSP] Crisis Core UI Upscale Project
« Reply #74 on: 2020-06-15 18:59:01 »
Sounds good. How do you feel about sorting the textures into 2 categories: Environmental and Characters? Then you can easily sort the characters by who they are in subfolders, as it's obvious who each one will belong to. It will also make things more convenient for the future, I think. It might be some work in texture.ini, but I think it'd be worth it. I might edit some clothes/faces when I'm bored (Aerith's dress irks me a bit with its quality, plus I need to make an optional nipple-pack add on for Zack again).

You might also want to make a third folder for Enemies, and you should be able to tell what a monster skin looks like.

There's a chance you might be missing some textures in those optional phone missions (which are really boring padding filler), but it's not a big deal. I might start another playthrough and analyze the textures soon.

I wish we had vierock's permission to use some of their textures, since they released some decent textures in the Shinra Building, but they totally noped out, so I guess we'll have to be doing it ourselves.

Also, I'm pretty sure it's fair use to upload dumped textures from video games as long as we don't put it behind a paywall, otherwise NexusMods and spriting sites would be under fire, and every HD texture pack too.