This is a gently AI upscaled texture pack for Portal 1.
The goal with this pack is to help the game look less blurry without trampling on the original artstyle and while avoiding the smeary "oil painting" look SR textures normally have. The name 'ZedTex' was selected to allow this pack to load first and therefore prevent any conflicts with other mods you have installed on top of it.
The result hopefully is something that doesn't look like "Portal but very sharpened", or "Portal but in the Portal 2 artstyle" or "Portal if it was a painting" but just looks like Portal
Demo Video:
Description:
This is a gently AI upscaled texture pack for Portal 1.
The goal with this pack is to help the game look less blurry without trampling on the original artstyle and while avoiding the smeary "oil painting" look SR textures normally have. The name 'ZedTex' was selected to allow this pack to load first and therefore prevent any conflicts with other mods you have installed on top of it.
The result hopefully is something that doesn't look like "Portal but very sharpened", or "Portal but in the Portal 2 artstyle" or "Portal if it was a painting" but just looks like Portal.
Instructions:
- Copy either the folder or the vpks from the Base Mod folder to steamapps/common/Portal/portal/custom
- Copy either the folders or vpks for each desired optional mod from the Optional Extras folder to steamapps/common/Portal/portal/custom
Included Optional Extras:
- ZedSnd: A high-fidelity soundpack for Portal crafted from multiple sound mods (listed in Credits) edited for compatibility
- Orange Hazard Liquid: Replaces the vanilla hazard liquid with the noxious orange version meant for the bottom face of the water (unused in the final game)
- White Phone: Replaces the red Emergency Phone in GLaDOS's chamber with the unused Lab Phone from the texture files (and vice-versa, for mod compatibility)
- Mel: Replaces Chell with her cut co-op reskin leftover in the files for Portal 2. Just a dinky placeholder reskin but worth including for variety
Credits:
Some base textures and materials taken with permission from:
Sound files and scripts in ZedSnd taken from:
Steps to recreate:
- Extracted all textures to png using Convert Folder utility in VTFEdit
- Ran the generated PNG files through ESRGAN (using IEU) using the 1x_DXTless_SourceEngine model to remove DXT compression artifacts
- Split the generated PNGs into three parts and upscaled them separately:
- Albedos (RGB): Upscaled using 4x UniscaleV2 Moderate interpolated 50% with Uniscale Restore with alpha channels ignored, downsampled back to 2x using Lanczos resampling
- Alpha channels: Scaled 2x using bicubic interpolation using the BIMP plugin for GIMP
- Normal/bump maps: Upscaled with RGB channels separated using 4x FSBox by Pandalism, downsampled back to 2x using Lanczos resampling
- Rejoined the RGB and alpha channels using the scripts included in the Resources folder
- Converted all textures back to vtf using Convert Folder utility in VTFEdit
- Used Find & Replace in Files in Notepad++ to add the following line to all brush textures:
"$basetexturetransform" "center 1 1 scale 2 2 rotate 0 translate 0 0"
- Tested in-game and removed texture scaling where necessary
Resources Used:
- Upscale.wiki - Wiki with information on upscaling using ESRGAN; with tutorials, custom models, and a Discord server where you can find help
- Valve Developer Community - Source Engine documentation, for example info on how to edit .vmt files
- GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program
- BIMP - batch processing plugin for GIMP
- Included Resources folder, with the ESRGAN models used and the scripts used for rejoining the separated RGB and Alpha channels
